We suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that (...) this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them. (shrink)

This paper is about the mode of being of names. The paper begins by explaining why the joke is on commentators who see Lewis Carroll's White Knight as applying the use/mention distinction. Then it argues that the real problem with the distinction is that the idea that names are used to mention what they name depends on mistakenly conceiving of language as existing autonomously; and that philosophers have this conception because they fail to appreciate what they are doing when they (...) philosophise about language. This failure also explains why philosophers mistakenly think of any manifestation of a name as a (physical) token. (shrink)

ArgumentA growing cross-disciplinary literature has acknowledged the importance of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of scientific texts. I contend that the proper understanding of these texts must flow from a hermeneutic model that takes verbal-visual interaction seriously, one that is firmly grounded in cognitive constraints and affordances. The model I propose has two modules, one for perception, derived from Gestalt psychology, the other for cognition, derived from Peirce's semiotics. I apply this model to an important but largely neglected (...) text in the history of nineteenth-century science, Charles Lyell'sThe Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, and to two accounts by well-respected historians of science, both of the same key discovery in quantum physics. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the advisability of incorporating the exegetical practices my model entails into the everyday practices of historians of science. (shrink)

A person's values are what that person regards as or thinks important; a society's values are what that society regards as important. A society's values are expressed in laws and legislatively enacted policies, in its mores, social habits, and positive morality. Any body's values—an individual person's or a society's—are subject to change, and in our time especially. An individual manifests his or her values in expressions of approval or disapproval, of admiration or disdain, by seeking or avoidance behaviour, and by (...) his or her characteristic activities. What one values one seeks for or tries to maintain. Sometimes attaining it leads to unexpected enlightenment—that isn't what one wanted after all. But a person's values are discovered most significantly in a reflective way by becoming aware of what one is willing to give up to attain or maintain one's values. This is the price one is willing to pay for it, and values are occasionally, and in the money and stock markets always, expressed in terms of price. This can be significant or it can be misleading; it depends on how it is interpreted. Not everything has a monetary equivalent, despite the attempts of the law to provide recovery for damages in monetary terms, and despite the cynical maxim, ‘Everyone has his price’. (shrink)

If one looks to the current textbook lore for reliable taxonomic and analytical information about the petitio principii, one is met with conceptual disarray and much too much nonsense. The present writers have recently attempted to furnish the beginnings of a theoretical reconstruction of this fallacy which is at once faithful to its formidable complexity yet useful as guide for its detection and avoidance. The fact is that the petitio has had a lengthy and interesting history, and in this paper (...) we shall want to explore certain features of its development, such as it may have been. The principal origins of the concept of circular argument are to be found in Aristotle. The Aristotelian doctrine recurs with variations in the sophismata literature of the middle ages and in logic texts and manuals right up to the present day. (shrink)

In 1883, while a student of C. S. Peirce at Johns Hopkins University, Christine Ladd-Franklin published a paper titled On the Algebra of Logic, in which she develops an elegant and powerful test for the validity of syllogisms that constitutes the most significant advance in syllogistic logic in two thousand years. Sadly, her work has been all but forgotten by logicians and historians of logic. Ladd-Franklin's achievement has been overlooked, partly because it has been overshadowed by the work of other (...) logicians of the nineteenth century renaissance in logic, but probably also because she was a woman. Though neglected, the significance of her contribution to the field of symbolic logic has not been diminished by subsequent achievements of others.In this paper, I bring to light the important work of Ladd-Franklin so that she is justly credited with having solved a problem over two millennia old. First, I give a brief survey of the history of syllogistic logic. In the second section, I discuss the logical systems called “algebras of logic”. I then outline Ladd-Franklin's algebra of logic, discussing how it differs from others, and explain her test for the validity of the syllogism, both in her symbolic language and the more familiar language of modern logic. Finally I present a rigorous proof of her theorem. Ladd-Franklin developed her algebra of logic before the methods necessary for a rigorous proof were available to her. Thus, I do now what she could not have done then. (shrink)