Two aspects of cognitive coupling, as brought forward in the Extended Mind Hypothesis, are discussed in this paper: how shall the functional coupling between the organism and some entity in his environment be spelled out in detail? What are the paradigmatic external entities to enter into that coupling? These two related questions are best answered in the light of an aetiological variety of functionalist argument that adds historical depth to the “active externalism” promoted by Clark and Chalmers and helps to (...) counter some of the core criticisms levelled against this view. Under additional reference to conceptual parallels between the Extended Mind Hypothesis and a set of heterodox theories in biology—environmental constructivism, niche construction, developmental systems theory—an argument for the grounding of environmentally extended cognitive traits in evolved biological functions is developed. In a spirit that seeks to integrate extended functionalism with views from cognitive integration and complementarity, it is argued that instances of environmental coupling should be understood as being constitutive to cognitive functions in either of two distinct ways. It is further argued that the historically and systematically prior environmental counterparts in that coupling are features of the natural environment. Language and linguistically imbued artefacts are likely to have descended from more basic relations that have an extension over the environment. (shrink)

In this paper I will take into examination the relevance of the main indispensability arguments for the comprehension of the applicability of mathematics. I will conclude not only that none of these indispensability arguments are of any help for understanding mathematical applicability, but also that these arguments rather require a preliminary analysis of the problems raised by the applicability of mathematics in order to avoid some tricky difficulties in their formulations. As a consequence, we cannot any longer consider the applicability (...) problems as subordinate to ontological ones: no ontological stance on mathematical entities can offer an easy road to the comprehension of the applicability of mathematics. (shrink)

The aim of the present volume is to draw the balance of naturalism's success so far.

An odd dissensus between confident metaphysicians and neopragmatist antimetaphysicians pervades early twenty-first century analytic philosophy. Each faction is convinced their side has won the day, but both are mistaken about the philosophical legacy of the twentieth century. More historical awareness is needed to overcome the current dissensus. Lewis and his possible-world system are lionised by metaphysicians; Quine’s pragmatist scruples about heavy-duty metaphysics inspire antimetaphysicians. But Lewis developed his system under the influence of his teacher Quine, inheriting from him his empiricism, (...) his physicalism, his metaontology, and, I will show in this paper, also his Humeanism. Using published as well as never-before-seen unpublished sources, I will make apparent that both heavy-duty metaphysicians and neopragmatist antimetaphysicians are wrong about the roles Quine and Lewis played in the development of twentieth-century philosophy. The two are much more alike than is commonly supposed, and Quine much more instrumental to the pedigree of current metaphysics. (shrink)

The problem of demarcating science from nonscience remains unsolved. This article executes an analytical process of elimination of different demarcation proposals put forward since the professionalization of the philosophy of science, explaining why each of those proposals is unsatisfactory or incomplete. Then, it elaborates on how to execute an alternative multicriterial scientific demarcation project put forward by Mahner. This project allows for the demarcation not only of science from non-science and from pseudoscience, but also of different types of sciences and (...) of scientific fields from each other. This article also offers arguments in favor of accepting two types of scientific demarcations, namely epistemic-warrant scientific demarcations and territorial scientific demarcations, and argues in favor of accepting a territorially broad scientific demarcation. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that anyone who accepts the ontology of scientific realism can only accept a pragmatic theory of truth, i.e., a theory on which truth is what it is epistemically right to believe. But the combination of realism with such a theory of truth is a form of internal realism; therefore, a scientific realist should be an internal realist. The strategy of the paper is to argue that there is no adequate semantic or correspondence theory of truth (...) compatible with a realist ontology, that a redundancy theory cannot account for the value of truth, and that the only kind of truth theory which can account for the value of truth, and is compatible with a realist ontology, is a pragmatic theory. The kind of truth theory I wish to defend is objective and naturalistic, and the ontology is realistic. My position is, therefore, one of objective, naturalistic realism. (shrink)

Depending on the realist or instrumentalist twist that is given to positivism, interesting arguments can be made for both causal and classical theories of reference with regard to the use of scientific terms in the language of theory. But my claim is that the rigid foundationalism that supports the theoretical terms via the correspondence rules of the Received View undercuts the notion that it is possible to argue coherently for a causal theory of reference as allied to a positivistic view.

This volumes aim is to provide an introduction to Carnaps book from a historical and philosophical perspective, each chapter focusing on one specific issue. The book will be of interest not only to Carnap scholars but to all those interested in the history of analytical philosophy.

A parallel reading of ten powerful works of conceptual and analytical originality yields a novel epistemological method based on the possibility of automated experimentation in engineering and architecture. An initial protocol for Parametric Epistemic Things, a particular kind of assemblage (as postulated by DeLanda following Deleuze & Guattari) that builds on Rheinberger’s ideas of Epistemic Things, is outlined and conceptualised to allow for the possibility of such automation. Following the interpretations of fragments from the texts, a discussion examines future potentials (...) and identifies some of the conceptual and pragmatic thresholds to overcome in order to leverage the proposal and situate it within a general theory of science and research, while attempting to answer the question at the heart of this essay: what is the role of parametric epistemic things in contemporary evolutionary architecture? (shrink)

O Fisicalismo tem sido a posição filosófica monista mais aceita no mainstream do debate contemporâneo sobre a natureza do mental. Mas o que significa dizer que tudo o que existe é “físico”? O presente trabalho busca responder à pergunta: Como as teses fisicalistas contemporâneas têm definido o termo ‘físico’ em suas proposições? Para respondê-la foi realizada uma investigação teórico-filosófica baseada em revisão bibliográfica e análise lógica e conceitual. Quatro categorias gerais de definição do termo ‘físico’ foram identificadas numa revisão da (...) literatura. Existem igualmente fortes críticas às propostas de definição em toda a discussão filosófica. Não temos uma definição incontroversa do que seja uma propriedade física, tampouco consenso sobre qual deveria ser a formulação mais adequada da tese fisicalista. Assim, a questão que se coloca é: Por que estamos discutindo o valor de verdade de uma tese que nem mesmo tem conseguido ser formulada de forma adequada? (shrink)

Cilj ovog rada je da razmotrimo zašto, i na koji način se Kvajn pozicionira između logičkih pozitivista i epistemoloških nihilista u pogledu shvatanja empirijskog svedočanstva. Naime, on će na nov način formulisati kriterijume opservacionalnosti s namerom da prevaziđe probleme koji su za logički pozitivizam bili nepremostivi, a da time ne žrtvuje objektivnost nauke poljuljanu krahom tradicionalnog pristupa epistemološkim pitanjima. Privučeni provokativnošću Kvajnovog istovremenog ispoljavanja radikalnih, ali i konzervativnih tendencija, odnosno namere da održi balans između stanovišta tradicionalne filozofije i epistemološkog nihilizma, (...) nastojaćemo da ispitamo koliko je Kvajn uspešan u svojoj zamisli. U zavisnosti od odgovora na to pitanje ocenićemo značaj i relevantnost kvajnovskog naturalističkog pristupa za empirističku epistemologiju. (shrink)

Ontology played a very large role in Quine’s philosophy and was one of his major preoccupations from the early 30’s to the end of his life. His work on ontology provided a basic framework for most of the discussions of ontology in analytic philosophy in the second half of the Twentieth Century. There are three main themes (and several sub-themes) that Quine developed in his work. The first is ontological commitment: What are the existential commitments of a theory? The second (...) is ontological reduction: How can an ontology be reduced to (or substituted by) another? And what is the most economical ontology that can be obtained for certain given purposes? The third is criteria of identity: When are entities of some kind (sets, properties, material objects, propositions, meanings, etc.) the same or different? In this paper I discuss Quine’s development of these three themes and some of the problems that were aised in connection with his work. (shrink)

After stressing how the attempt to provide a plausible account of the connection between language and the world was one of Putnam’s constant preoccupations, this article describes the four stages his thinking about the concepts of truth and reality went through. Particular attention is paid to the kinds of problems that made him abandon each stage to enter the next. The analysis highlights how all the stages but one express a general non-epistemic stance towards truth and reality—the right stance, according (...) to Putnam, in order to develop full-blooded realism. Since the last stage combines a version of direct realism with a pluralist conception of truth, the article proceeds by focusing on Putnam’s alethic pluralism, carefully distinguishing it from alethic deflationism. Finally a suggestion is made as to where Putnam’s alethic pluralism may be placed within the constellation of current pluralist positions about truth. (shrink)

In 1901 Russell had envisaged the new analytic philosophy as uniquely systematic, borrowing the methods of science and mathematics. A century later, have Russell’s hopes become reality? David Lewis is often celebrated as a great systematic metaphysician, his influence proof that we live in a heyday of systematic philosophy. But, we argue, this common belief is misguided: Lewis was not a systematic philosopher, and he didn’t want to be. Although some aspects of his philosophy are systematic, mainly his pluriverse of (...) possible worlds and its many applications, that systematicity was due to the influence of his teacher Quine, who really was an heir to Russell. Drawing upon Lewis’s posthumous papers and his correspondence as well as the published record, we show that Lewis’s non- Quinean influences, including G.E. Moore and D.M. Armstrong, led Lewis to an anti- systematic methodology which leaves each philosopher’s views and starting points to his or her own personal conscience. (shrink)

How should we understand the relationship between the contents of our color, causal, modal, and evaluative beliefs, on the one hand, and color, causal, modal, and evaluative properties, on the other? According to Barry Stroud (2011), because of the nature of the contents of those types of beliefs, we should also think that what he calls a “negative metaphysical verdict” on the latter is not one that we could consistently maintain. The metaphysical project aims to arrive at an improved conception (...) of ourselves and our relation the world, no matter if that conception is positive or negative. But if Stroud is right that we cannot consistently arrive at the view that all of our causal, modal, and evaluative beliefs are systematically false, we will see that we cannot consistently reach the negative verdict. But failure to reach the negative verdict doesn’t mean that we have reached the positive verdict. Stroud calls this philosophical failure “metaphysical dissatisfaction”. In this paper, I argue that we can appropriate a metaepistemological response to the problem of the external world which shares its core features with Stroud’s (2000, 2011) arguments, but which nevertheless leaves us with a distinctive kind of epistemological dissatisfaction. (shrink)

In this paper I return to the mid-20th-century debate between Quine and Carnap on the status of metaphysics questions with an eye toward advancing contemporary debates about whether naturalists can coherently undertake substantive metaphysical inquiry. Following Huw Price, I take the debate between Quine and Carnap to hinge, in part, on whether human inquiry is functionally unified. However, unlike Price, I suggest that this question is not best understood as a question about the function(s) of descriptive discourse. This goes along (...) with rejecting a “linguistic conception” of the starting point of metaphysical inquiry, which, although shared by Quine and Carnap, Price gives us no good reason to think is mandatory for naturalists. I sketch two reasons naturalists have to reject a particular manifestation of this linguistic conception in Quine’s work—his criterion of ontological commitment. Finally, I show how these reasons can help us identify the grains of truth in some recent critiques of “mainstream metaphysics of mind.”. (shrink)

Contemporary analytic philosophy is dominated by metaphilosophical naturalism, the view that philosophy ought to be continuous with science. This naturalistic turn is for a significant part due to the work of W. V. Quine. Yet, the development and the reception of Quine’s naturalism have never been systematically studied. In this paper, I examine Quine’s evolving naturalism as well as the reception of his views. Scrutinizing a large set of unpublished notes, correspondence, drafts, papers, and lectures as well as published responses (...) to Quine’s work, I show how both internal tensions and external criticisms forced him to continuously develop, rebrand, and refine his metaphilosophy before he explicitly decided to label his view ‘naturalism’ in the late 1960s. (shrink)

Both Carnap and Quine made significant contributions to the philosophy of mathematics despite their diversed views. Carnap endorsed the dichotomy between analytic and synthetic knowledge and classified certain mathematical questions as internal questions appealing to logic and convention. On the contrary, Quine was opposed to the analytic-synthetic distinction and promoted a holistic view of scientific inquiry. The purpose of this paper is to argue that in light of the recent advancement of experimental mathematics such as Monte Carlo simulations, limiting mathematical (...) inquiry to the domain of logic is unjustified. Robustness studies implemented in Monte Carlo Studies demonstrate that mathematics is on par with other experimental-based sciences. (shrink)