Critics of Dewey’s metaphysics point to his dismissal of any philosophy which locates ideals in a realm beyond experience. However, Dewey’s sustained critique of dualistic philosophies is but a first step in his reconstruction and recovery of the function of the metaphysical. Detaching the discussion of values from inquiry, whether scientific, philosophical or educational, produces the same end as relegating values to a transcendent realm that is beyond ordinary human discourse. Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics supports his progressive educational philosophy. The duty (...) of education is grounded in its service to democracy; it must help students develop the ability to express, discuss, and develop their moral reasoning through experiential and experimental learning. (shrink)

I offer an explicit account of the underdetermination thesis as well as of the many challenges it poses to scientific realism; a way to answer to these challenges is explored and outlined, by shifting attention to the content of theories. I argue that, even if we have solid grounds (as I contend we do) to support that some varieties of the underdetermination thesis are true, scientific realism can still offer an adequate picture of the aims and achievements of science.

It is commonplace to describe the pragmatist conception of truth as incompatible with correspondence theory. This popular description relies on a deflationary reading of Peirce and James’s many apparent endorsements of correspondence. This reading says they regarded it as a mere platitude or truism, not as a substantive piece of philosophical theorizing. There are two main reasons typically offered in support of this platitude narrative – its consonance with Peirce’s original formulation of PT from 1878, and the objections that pragmatists (...) frequently raised against various notions traditionally associated with CT. I argue that neither reason is compelling and that PT and CT are compatible conceptions of truth. (shrink)

The issue of realism about the physical world is distinct from the semantic issue of correspondence truth. So it is an aberration to identify the two issues (Dummett), to dismiss the realism issue out of hostility to correspondence truth (Rorty, Fine), to think that that issue is one of interpretation, or to argue against realism by criticizing various claims about truth and reference (Putnam, Laudan). It is also an aberration to identify realism with nonskepticism, truth-as-the-aim-of-science, or scientific convergence. Realism is (...) an overarching metaphysical issue which should be settled before any of these epistemic and semantic issues. (shrink)

We need to find a middle way between the exaggerated deference towards science characteristic of scientism, and the exaggerated suspicion characteristic of anti-scientific attitudes — to acknowledge that science is neither sacred nor a confidence trick. The Critical Commonsensist account of scientific evidence and scientific method offered here corrects the narrowly logical approach of the Old Deferentialists without succumbing to the New Cynics' sociologism or their factitious despair of the epistemic credentials of science.

The idea of a double-aspect approach to a philosophical conundrum is familiar in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and has been recently introduced as well into epistemology. As a class, double-aspect theories attempt, as it might be put, reconciliation by reorientation. Matter and mind, for double-aspect theorists, are not independent substances, whose co-presence in a single entity such as a human person might be deeply mysterious; they are different aspects of a single substance — a person in modest versions (...) of the theory like Strawson's, the universe as a whole in Spinoza's more ambitious case. Similarly, according to Susan Haack, the epistemic justification of a belief of a given subject is not something conceptually isolated from a causal explanation of its presence, but rather epistemic justification has two aspects, a causal one concerned with what a subject's evidence for a belief is, and an evaluative one concerned with how good the subject's evidence is. (shrink)

This thesis evaluates and compares two versions of neutral monism, one developed by William James and the other by Bertrand Russell. Both argued against Cartesianism in favour of a "subjectless given" as the basic stuff which constitutes both mind and matter. My evaluation will demonstrate that James’s and Russell's supposedly neutral entities are not neutral as their exponents claim because they fail to satisfy important criteria set for a theory to be genuinely neutral. There are two fundamental elements within my (...) discussion of the neutral entities. Firstly, I shall demonstrate that although James's initial repudiation of dualistic epistemology of subject and object, knower and known, led him to avoid metaphysical dualism of mental and physical, in Cartesian sense, by committing him to the view that there is one kind of entity called "experience", his final analysis admitted an internal distinction within the supposedly simple neutral entities. I shall call this covert dualism. Accepting James’s radical empiricism as an archetype, Russell’s early commitment to neutral monism led him to assert three distinctive kinds of entities, sensation, image and unperceived, and was therefore not complete as that of James. In order to bring his theory in line with James, Russell, in his mature version, entirely repudiated the dualistic view of perception which, following Moore, he accepted, to reject idealism. Russell declared percept as the neutral entity, which is both mental and material at once. But by re-introducing epistemological dualism, as James did, Russell admitted that a percept is not simple but complete bundle of compresent qualities and relations. 1 shall argue that like James’ his theory also collapses into covert dualism. Secondly, I shall argue that to produce a genuinely explanatory theory of neutral entities James and Russell exploited science to justify their theories. In course of their analysis they produced various arguments which has been considered as circular. An attempt will be made to show that the apparent circularity of their analysis is really part of a sophisticated programme, now known as bootstrapping. The notion of a bootstrap strategy has recently been developed in philosophy of science, and suggests a way in which the same evidence can be used to generate both a general and specific hypothesis. The thesis is divided into eight chapters. Chapters one, two and four are largely exegetical and chronological, and discuss the development of neutral monism especially in James and Russell’s philosophy together with the general characteristics of the theory as distinguished from other theories explaining mind and matter. Chapters three, five and six critically analyse James’s and Russell’s versions respectively to show their theories collapse into covert dualism. In chapter seven we argue that the alleged circularities in their theory are non- viscious and their employment of a bootstrap strategy introduced a profound innovation in epistemology. (shrink)

This paper gives a critical evaluation of the philosophical presuppositions and implications of two current schools in the sociology of knowledge: the Strong Programme of Bloor and Barnes; and the Constructivism of Latour and Knorr-Cetina. Bloor's arguments for his externalist symmetry thesis (i.e., scientific beliefs must always be explained by social factors) are found to be incoherent or inconclusive. At best, they suggest a Weak Programme of the sociology of science: when theoretical preferences in a scientific community, SC, are first (...) internally explained by appealing to the evidence, e, and the standards or values, V, accepted in SC, then a sociologist may sometimes step in to explain why e and V were accepted in SC. Latour's story about the social construction of facts in scientific laboratories is found to be misleading or incredible. The idea that scientific reality is an artifact turns out to have some interesting affinities with classical pragmatism, instrumentalism, phenomenology, and internal realism. However, the constructivist account of theoretical entities in terms of negotiation and social consensus is less plausible than the alternative realist story which explains consensus by the preexistence of mind-independent real entities. The author concludes that critical scientific realism, developed with the concept of truthlikeness, is compatible with the thesis that scientific beliefs or knowledge claims may be relative to various types of cognitive and practical interests. However, the realist denies, with good reasons, the stronger type of relativism which takes reality and truth to be relative to persons, groups, or social interests. (shrink)

A natural language is an organic living thing; and meanings change as words take on new, and shed old, connotations. Recent philosophy of language has paid little attention to the growth of meaning; radical philosophers like Feyerabend and Rorty have suggested that meaning-change undermines the pretensions of science to be a rational enterprise. Thinkers in the classical pragmatist tradition, however -Peirce in philosophy of science and, more implicitly, Holmes in legal theory- both recognized the significance of growth of meaning, and (...) understood how it can contribute to the progress of science and to the adaptation of a legal system to changing circumstances. This paper develops these insights, and illustrates them by reference to the growth of meaning of "DNA" from the identification of "nuclein" to the discovery of mtDNA almost a century later, and the growth of meaning of "the establishment of religion" in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution from its ratification in 1791 to the present day. Arguing that the growth of meaning can indeed contribute to rationality, it also shows why narrowly formal models are inadequate both to science and to law. Un lenguaje natural es una cosa viviente orgánica, y los significados cambian a medida que las palabras adoptan nuevas connotaciones y abandonan viejas. La filosofía del lenguaje reciente ha prestado poca atención al desarrollo del significado; filósofos radicales, como Feyerabend y Rorty han sugerido que el cambio de significado socava las pretensiones de la ciencia de ser una empresa racional. Pensadores en la tradición pragmatista clásica, sin embargo -Peirce en la filosofía de la ciencia y, más implícitamente, Holmes en la teoría del Derecho- reconocieron la importancia del desarrollo del significado y comprendieron cómo éste puede contribuir al progreso de la ciencia y a la adaptabilidad de un sistema jurídico a las circunstancias cambiantes. Este trabajo desarrolla estas ideas, y las ilustra por medio de una referencia a el desarrollo del significado de "ADN" desde la identificación de la "nucleína" hasta el descubrimiento del ADN mitocondrial casi un siglo más tarde, y el desarrollo del significado de "el establecimiento de una religión" en la Primera Enmienda de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos desde su ratificación en 1791 hasta la actualidad. Argumentando que el desarrollo del significado puede contribuir mucho a la racionalidad, también muestra por qué los modelos estrechamente formales son inadecuados, tanto para la ciencia como para el Derecho. (shrink)

Abstract The problem of the existence of the objects of knowledge is the main problem in the controversy between realism and anti?realism. This controversy appears on three levels: (i) perceptions, (ii) concepts, (iii) scientific theories. According to perception?realism, things exist objectively; according to subjective idealism, they are only bundles of impressions. According to conceptual realism, genera (classes) exist objectively; according to nominalism, they do not exist (there are only general names). According to scientific realism, the objects of confirmed theories, including (...) unobservable entities, exist objectively; according to phenomenalism, only observable bodies exist. On each level a naive realism and a critical realism is distinguished. On the level of scientific theories direct objects (ideal models) are distinguished from ultimate objects (real entities). (shrink)