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.

Most scholars who presently deal with the Mind-Body problem consider themselves monist materialists. Nevertheless, many of them also assume that there exist (in some sense of existence) mental entities. But since these two positions do not harmonize quite well, the literature is full of discussions about how to reconcile the positions. In this paper, I will defend a materialist theory that avoids all these problems by completely rejecting the existence of mental entities. This is Quine's repudiation theory. According to the (...) theory, there are no mental entities, and the behavioral or physiological phenomena that have been attributed to mental entities, or that point to the existence of these entities, are exclusively caused by physiological factors. To be sure, several objections have been raised to materialist theories that do not assign some role to mental entities. But we will see that Quine is able to give convincing replies to these objections. (shrink)

This is a defense of the doctrine of scientific realism. SR is defined through the following two claims: Most essential unobservables posited by the well-established current scientific theories exist independently of our minds. We know our well-established scientific theories to be approximately true. I first offer positive argumentation for SR. I begin with the so-called 'success arguments' for SR: 1) scientific theories most of the times entail successful predictions; 2) science is methodologically successful in generating empirically successful theories. SR explains (...) these facts via inference to the best explanation. I combine Hacking's experimental argument for entity realism with Salmon's common-cause principle. I take entity realism to be foundational to SR: one may believe in the existence of some theoretical entities without believing in any particular theory in which these are embedded. Its motivation comes from experimental practice, where the manipulation of these entities often relies on incompatible theoretical accounts. The underdetermination topic is thereafter discussed. Several attempts to distinguish between an observable and an unobservable realm are critically discussed, as well as the possibility that for any given theory, there are empirically equivalents generated by means of algorithms. I present extensive argumentation to the effect that such algorithmic rivals are not to be taken seriously. Social constructivism is being critically treated. I proceed by distinguishing between a metaphysical, a semantic, and an epistemic variant of SC. I conclude that only a moderate metaphysical constructivism can stand on its own feet. Its claim is merely that some facts about the world are socially constructed. I finish with a plea for a selective SR, able to do justice to the presence of both instrumentalism and modest constructivism in scientific practice. (shrink)

Criteria of empirical significance are supposed to state conditions under which reference to an unobservable object or property is “empirically meaningful.” The intended kind of empirical meaningfulness should be necessary for admissibility into the selective contexts of scientific inquiry. I defend Justus’s recent argument that the reasons generally given for rejecting the project of defining a significance criterion are unpersuasive. However, as I show, this project remains wedded to an overly narrow conception of its subject matter. Even the most cutting (...) edge significance criteria identify empirical significance with predictive power, and thereby rule out vocabulary with legitimate scientific functions. In a nutshell, the problem is that there are terms that reduce the computational burden of extracting predictions from theory, and that may therefore be scientifically useful, but that do not add to the theory’s observational consequences, and so are ruled scientifically inadmissibility by existing significance criteria. I spell out this objection by specifying shortcut terms that are ruled inadmissible by Creath’s and Schurz’s criteria. Having objected in this way to extant criteria, and to the equation of empirical significance with predictive power in general, I discuss an approach to defining empirical significance that is capable of avoiding my objection and, more ambitiously, that may break the cycle of “punctures and patches” that has plagued the project from the beginning. I gloss Goldfarb and Ricketts’s idea of “case-by-case” delineations of empirically significant terms as the provision of special rather than general explications of the informal concept of empirical significance. (shrink)

This dissertation consists of three parts. Part I is a defense of an artificial language methodology in philosophy and a historical and systematic defense of the logical empiricists' application of an artificial language methodology to scientific theories. These defenses provide a justification for the presumptions of a host of criteria of empirical significance, which I analyze, compare, and develop in part II. On the basis of this analysis, in part III I use a variety of criteria to evaluate the scientific (...) status of intelligent design, and further discuss confirmation, reduction, and concept formation. (shrink)

En este artículo se traza una distinción clara y precisa entre geometría pura y geometría aplicada dentro del marco de las reflexiones sobre los fundamentos de la geometría promovidas por la aparición de geometrías no-euclidianas y en el contexto de las discusiones mantenidas por los empiristas lógicos sobre la estructura general de las teorías empíricas. De manera más particular, se defiende, tal y como proponen los empiristas lógicos, que una geometría pura es un sistema formal que no nos dice nada (...) sobre la realidad física, mientras que una geometría aplicada es una teoría empírica, una teoría física (una teoría del espacio) que resulta de dotar de significado a una geometría matemática. Para sostener esta tesis se recurre, en parte, a ciertas ideas expresadas por Einstein sobre la teoría general de la relatividad. Por último, si bien parece que esta imagen de la estructura de una geometría física es relativamente adecuada, se insiste en la tesis de que el error principal de los empiristas lógicos estaría entonces en pretender hacer de ella el carácter predominante de la estructura de las teorías científicas en general. (shrink)

It is modernly debated whether application of the free will has potential to cause harm to nature. Power possessed to the discourse, sensory/perceptual, physical influences on life experience by the slow moving machinery of change is a viral element in the problems of civilization; failed resolution of historical paradox involving mind and matter is a recurring source of problems. Reference is taken from the writing of Euclid in which a oneness of nature as an indivisible point of thought is made (...) prerequisite in criteria of interpretation to demonstrate that contemporary scientific methodologies alternately ensue from the point of empirically centered induction. A qualification for conceptualizations is proposed that involves a physically describable form bound to energy in addition to contemporary notions of energy bound to form and a visually based mathematical-physical form is elaborated and discussed with respect to biological and natural processes. (shrink)

We outline a ‘formal theory of scientific theories’ rooted in the theory of profunctors; the category-theoretic asset stresses the fact that the scope of scientific knowledge is to build ‘meaningful connections’ between a linguistic object and the world W said language ought to describe. Such a world is often unfathomable, and thus we can only resort to a smaller fragment of it in our analysis: this is the ‘observational category’ O ⊆ W. From this we build the category [O op, (...) Set] of all possible displacements of observational terms O. The self-duality of the bicategory of profunctors accounts for the fact that theoretical and observational terms can exchange their rôle without substantial changes in the resulting predictive-descriptive theory; this provides evidence for the idea that their separation is a mere linguistic convention; to every profunctor R linking T and O one can associate an object O ] R T obtained glueing together the two categories and accounting for the mutual relations subsumed by R. Under mild assumptions, such an arrangement of functors, profunctors, and gluings provides a categorical interpretation for the ‘Ramseyfication’ operation, in a very explicit sense: in a scientific theory, if a computation entails a certain behaviour for the system the theory describes, then saturating its theoretical variables with actual observed terms, we obtain the entailment in the world. (shrink)

Resumen: Usualmente se ha asumido que una única distinción puede dar cuenta del rol que cumplen los conceptos en una teoría respecto de la contrastación y respecto de la explicación. Intentaremos mostrar que esta asunción es incorrecta. Por una parte, no hay razones para considerar que esta coincidencia deba darse, y por otra, como se intentará mostrar a partir de varios ejemplos, de hecho, no se da. La base de contrastación de una teoría no tiene por qué coincidir con el (...) explanandum de la teoría. Para defender este punto se asumirá el estructuralismo metateórico. Se extraerán consecuencias para la concepción metateórica presupuesta. Palabras claves: Explicación; contrastación; T-teoricidad; Estructuralismo metateórico; Distinción teórico observacional -/- Title: Explain and test Abstract: It is usually held that one distinction can account for the role that concepts play in a theory regarding both test and explanation. We will demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. On the one hand, there is no reason to think that this coincidence should exist. On the other, this is not the case, as we will show analysing several examples. The testing basis of a theory does not have to coincide with the explanandum of the theory. To defend this point we will endorse de metatheoretical structuralism. In addition, we will consider some repercussions that this discussion has for the assumed metatheoretical framework. Key-words: Explanation; Test; T-theoreticity; Metatheoretical Structuralism; Theoretical observational distinction . (shrink)

Scientific activity produces results of various types. In particular, science produces a special kind of knowledge or knowledges, assumed to be different from knowledge or common sense knowledge, from everyday experience and formulated in ordinary language; a more systematized knowledge, with greater range and accuracy, and intersubjectively controllable. To produce this kind of knowledge (or knowledge), we introduce new concepts, formulate hypotheses and laws and, ultimately, construct theories, being the result of a practice or specific activity, considering science as (perhaps), (...) the supreme intellectual achievement of mankind. Thus, philosophical theorizing of science, or “philosophy of science”, is characterized by the development of interpretative conceptual frameworks of philosophical character, in order to understand science. Philosophy of science is, not just part of metascience, but also a part of philosophy, precisely that which is responsible for analyzing science. (shrink)

John Earman and John T. Roberts advocate a challenging and radical claim regarding the semantics of laws in the special sciences: the statistical account. According to this account, a typical special science law “asserts a certain precisely defined statistical relation among well-defined variables” and this statistical relation does not require being hedged by ceteris paribus conditions. In this paper, we raise two objections against the attempt to cash out the content of special science generalizations in statistical terms.

This chapter traces the development of structural realism within the scientific realism debate and the wider current of structuralism that has swept the philosophy of the natural sciences in the twentieth century.1 The primary aim is to make perspicuous the many manifestations of structural realism and their underlying claims. Among other things, I will compare structural realism’s various manifestations in order to throw more light onto the relations between them. At the end of the chapter, I will identify the main (...) objections raised against the epistemic form of structural realism. This last task will pave the way for the evaluation of the structural realist answer to the main epistemological question, an evaluation that will be central to the rest of this dissertation. (shrink)

The classic “self-undermining objection” to the verificationist criterion of meaning states that the criterion does not meet its own standard: since verificationism is not empirically confirmable, analytic, or contradictory, verificationism implies its own meaninglessness. This essay reconstructs and motivates Carnap’s response to this objection. The interpretation presented is contrasted with those of Putnam and Ricketts. I argue that Carnap’s basic move in response to the self-undermining objection is to construe his verificationism as an analytic definition of “meaningfulness” that is meaningful (...) by its own lights. I then discuss possible motivations for this definition. I argue, against Reichenbach, Ayer, and Hempel, that it is not an analysis of the everyday concept of meaning. Instead, I claim, the definition is motivated _pragmatically_: verificationism replaces the ordinary conception of meaning with one that purports to capture all and only the expressions that are pragmatically useful to the scientist. Finally, I consider whether pragmatism faces a self-undermining objection to of its own. I argue that pragmatism is a preference concerning formal languages, and that, since preferences need not apply to themselves, pragmatism is not self- undermining. (shrink)