This chapter considers how Liberal Naturalism interacts with the main problems and theories in the philosophy of perception. After briefly summarising the traditional philosophical problems of perception and outlining the standard philosophical theories of perceptual experience, it discusses whether a Liberal Naturalist outlook should incline one towards or away from any of these standard theories. Particular attention is paid to the work of John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, two of the most prominent Liberal Naturalists, whose work was also very influential (...) in the philosophy of perception. There is also a section focusing on colour, an especially important topic not only for debates about perceptual experience but also for debates concerning how our ‘manifest image’ of the natural world relates to our best theories in the physical sciences. (shrink)

A large part of Hilary Putnam’s latest work is spent on disagreeing with John McDowell’s conceptualist view of perception which has been expressed in Mind and World and the McDowellian disjunctivism. Nevertheless, Putnam does not articulate which specific aspects of McDowell’s view he disagrees with. This paper endeavours to: first, clarify what Putnam’s disagreement with McDowell precisely is based on an investigation of the views held by each of the two philosophers regarding the problem of the mind and perception, as (...) well as their attitudes toward the relevant sciences; and second, examine Putnam’s argument against McDowell, then reconstruct it in its most plausible form. Before diving into Putnam’s exact disagreement with McDowell in §3, I consider it important to first clarify the common stance that the two philosophers share, namely the stance which opposes reductionism and eliminativism about the mind. Following that, I will explicate the views held by each of the two philosophers as well as point out where they diverge or disagree on. We will see that Putnam has appreciated the virtue in McDowell’s conceptualist view of doxastic perception. Nevertheless, Putnam argues that perceptual experience is not exhausted by what must be put under the actualisation of the perceiving subject’s conceptual capacities, and there is the dimension of ‘sense impression’, together with the possibility for science’s intervention to our discussion on perception, that has been neglected by McDowell. Finally, in §4, I will discuss some problems I have found in Putnam’s argument and give my own solutions in the hope of contributing to today’s current debates. I argue that ‘sense impression’, though it exceeds the perceiver’s acquired conceptual capacities, must in principle be conceptual insofar as it can be intelligible to us. Putnam’s criticism of McDowell only stands if McDowell’s conceptualist view is understood as a static first-order metaphysical picture of human perception. Meanwhile, Putnam’s proposal for science’s intervention should be taken not as aiming at a better substitutive picture to McDowell’s, but as advocating a certain attitude towards our enterprise of studying human perception which is always open to possible collaborations between different disciplines as well as to possible critiques from future reflections. (shrink)

A collective understanding that traces a debate between 'what is science?’ and ‘what is a science about?’ has an extraction to the notion of scientific knowledge. The debate undertakes the pursuit of science that hardly extravagance the dogma of pseudo-science. Scientific conjectures invoke science as an intellectual activity poured by experiences and repetition of the objects that look independent of any idealist views (believes in the consensus of mind-dependence reality). The realistic machinery employs in an empiricist exposition of the objective (...) phenomenon by synchronizing the general method to make observational predictions that cover all the phenomena of the particular entity without any exception. The formation of science encloses several epistemological purviews and a succession of conjectures cum refutation that a newer theorem could reinstate. My attempt is to advocate a holistic plea of scientific conjectures that outruns the restricted regulation of experience or testable hypothesis to render the validity of a chain of logical reasoning (deductive or inductive) of basic scientific statements. The milieu of scientific intensification integrates speculation that loads efficiency towards a new experimental dimension where the reality is not itself objective or observers relative; in fact the observed phenomenon divulges in the constructive progression of preferred methods of falsifiability and uncertainty. (shrink)

The methodological foundations of any scientific discipline are shaped by the goals towards which that discipline is aiming. While it is almost universally accepted that the goals of explanation and prediction of natural and non-human phenomena have been met with great success since the scientific revolution, it is almost just as universally accepted that the social sciences have not even come close to achieving these goals. This raises the question addressed in this paper, namely, what is economics, and social science (...) more broadly speaking, for? What is their aim, and how is it similar and dissimilar to that of the natural sciences as we have come to classify them? I take up this question from a pragmatic perspective in this paper, setting economics within the wider context of social inquiry. Specifically, I turn to Hilary Putnam and John Dewey as exemplars of the pragmatic critique of any economics that sees its goals in line with those of the natural sciences, that is, as aiming for explanation and prediction according to governing laws of human behaviour. NB: this is a preprint that underwent some minor edits. (shrink)

This chapter explores perspectivism in the American Pragmatist tradition. On the one hand, the thematization of perspectivism in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science can benefit from resources in the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the Pragmatists have interesting and innovative, pluralistic views that can be illuminated through the lens of perspectivism. I pursue this inquiry primarily through examining relevant sources from the Pragmatist tradition. I will illustrate productive engagements between pragmatism and perspectivism in three areas: in (...) the pragmatists’ fallibilistic theories of inquiry and truth, in their pluralistic metaphysics, and in their views on cultural pluralism. While there are some potential sticking points between pragmatism and perspectivism, particularly around the visual metaphor of perspective, these philosophical approaches nonetheless have much to learn from each other. Perspectivism is in danger of falling between the horns of pernicious relativism and a platitudinous view of the limits of human perception and cognition. The pragmatists accounts of truth and reality open the possibility of a more thoroughgoing perspectivism. I will follow this thread through Charles S. Peirce’s, William James’, and John Dewey’s theories of inquiry and truth, Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics, James’ radical pluralism, Dewey’s cultural naturalism, Richard Rorty’s anti-essentialism, Jane Addams’ standpoint epistemology, W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of race consciousness, Horace Kallen’s and Alain LeRoy Locke’s cultural pluralism, and Mary Parker Follett’s account of pluralistic integration. (shrink)

This article builds on C. S. Peirce’s suggestive blueprint for an inclusive outlook that grants reality to his three categories. Moving away from the usual focus on (contentious) cosmological forces, I use a modal principle to partition various ontological layers: regular sign-action (like coded language) subsumes actual sign-action (like here-and-now events) which in turn subsumes possible sign-action (like qualities related to whatever would be similar to them). Once we realize that the triadic sign’s components are each answerable to this asymmetric (...) subsumption, we obtain the means to track at which level of complexity semiosis finds itself, in a given case. Since the bulk of such a “trinitarian” metaphysics would be devoted to countenancing uninterpreted phenomena, I argue that current misgivings about sign-based ontologies are largely misplaced. (shrink)

In this paper, I intend to make a case for Buddhist phenomenology. By Buddhist phenomenology, I mean a phenomenological interpretation of Yogācāra’s doctrine of consciousness. Yet, this interpretation will be vulnerable if I do not justify the way in which the anti-essentialistic Buddhist philosophy can countenance the Husserlian essence. I dub this problem of compatibility between Buddhist and phenomenology the ‘problem of essence’. Nevertheless, I argue that this problem will not jeopardize Buddhist phenomenology because: 1) Yogācārins, especially late Yogācārins represented (...) by Xuanzang do not articulate emptiness as a negation but as an affirmation of the existent; 2) Husserl’s phenomenological essence is not a substance that Yogācārins reject but the ideal sense that Yogācārins also stress. After resolving the problem of essence, I formulate Buddhist phenomenology as follows: on the epistemological level, it describes intentional acts of consciousness; on the meta-epistemological level, it entails transcendental idealism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to articulate a Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism as well as a Foucauldian critique of the nomothetic framework underlying the Placement Problem. My Foucauldian post-structuralist critique of scientific naturalism questions the relations between our society’s imbrication of economic-political power structures and knowledge in a way that also effects some constructive critical alignment between Foucault and Habermas, helping to undermine the traditional view of their respective social critiques as incompatible. First, I will outline a (...) brief genealogical backstory for the rise of scientific naturalism, and I will then reconstruct the Placement Problem. In the second part of the paper, I introduce Foucault’s notion of pouvoir-savoir, namely his account of the interconnection between power and knowledge. I then go on to articulate the Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism by arguing that the levelling nature of nomothetic rationality and its conservative naturalistic vocabulary involves regulative discourse: anything that resists placeability/locatability is labelled “odd”. By being thus visibly marked, “odd” phenomena become “queer” phenomena, which then become “problematic” phenomena. They are, thereby, construed in need of discipline. Understood in this Foucauldian way, scientific naturalist disciplinarity produces subjected and practised minds, “docile” minds. (shrink)

In the past generation, various philosophers have been concerned with the so-called “placement problem” for naturalism. The problem has taken on the shorthand alliteration of the 4Ms, since Mind/Mentality, Meaning, Morality, and Modality/Mathematics are four important phenomena that are difficult to place within orthodox construals of naturalism, typified by physicalism and a methodological preference for ways of knowing associated with the natural sciences. In this paper I highlight the importance of temporality to this ostensibly forced choice between naturalism and the (...) 4Ms, and then reframe the problem by advocating a temporal naturalism rather than the atemporal versions that remain the orthodoxy. In short, I argue in Section 1 that scientific naturalism is standardly atemporal in outlook and in philosophical presuppositions, in Section 2 that temporality is a fundamental condition for each of the 4Ms (drawing on insights from classical phenomenology), and hence the intransigence of the dilemma. Instead of accepting this construal, in Section 3 I outline a temporal naturalism that owes more to biology than to physics (and hence more to Peter Godfrey-Smith than Huw Price), where we also see temporally dependent “points of view” in incipient biological forms, and where the norms surrounding explanation are less nomological and reductive in orientation. (shrink)

Alfred Tarski’s refinement of an account of truth into a formal system that turns on the acceptance of Convention-T has had a lasting impact on philosophical logic, especially work concerning truth, meaning, and other semantic notions. In a series of studies completed from the 1930s to the 1960s, Arne Næss collected and analysed intuitive responses from non-philosophers to questions concerning truth, synonymy, certainty, and probability. Among the formulations of truth studied by Næss were practical variants of expressions of the form (...) “p’ is true if and only if p’. This paper calls attention to a series of experimental results Næss overlooked in his original study. These data collectively suggest that acceptance of expressions of the form “p’ is true if and only if p’ varies according to what kind of statement p is. (shrink)

Argues that truth, moral right, political right, and aesthetic value may be understood as arising out of a naturalist account of humanity, if naturalism is rightly conceived.

ABSTRACTZalabardo argues that the Tractatus account of picturing is a direct and successful refutation of Russell’s ‘multiple relation’ theory of judgment, its role being ontological: Wittgenstein...

The paper is devoted to Richard Rorty’s thought, with the aim of exploiting a certain contention of his and directing it, as it were, against Rorty himself. Here is the contention: he thinks that – when it comes to metaphysical questions such as realism and anti-realism – the only kind of argument a pragmatist has at her disposal is rhetorical. Following the lines of the well-known wager Blaise Pascal laid on the belief in the existence of God, I will try (...) to show that the realist can avail herself of a rhetorical argument in favor of her view which is more convincing than any rhetorical argument of a Rortyan kind, while abiding by the Rortyan maxim according to which ‘What has no bearing on our practice, shouldn’t have a bearing on philosophy’. This will allow me to challenge Rorty standing on his home ground. (shrink)