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  1. What Logical Evidence Could not be.Matteo Baggio - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (5):2559–2587.
    By playing a crucial role in settling open issues in the philosophical debate about logical consequence, logical evidence has become the holy grail of inquirers investigating the domain of logic. However, despite its indispensable role in this endeavor, logical evidence has retained an aura of mystery. Indeed, there seems to be a great disharmony in conceiving the correct nature and scope of logical evidence among philosophers. In this paper, I examine four widespread conceptions of logical evidence to argue that all (...)
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  • Sellars, Analyticity, and a Dynamic Picture of Language.Takaaki Matsui - 2024 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 14 (1):78-102.
    Even after Willard Quine’s critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Wilfrid Sellars maintained some forms of analyticity or truth in virtue of meaning. In this article, I aim to reconstruct (a) his neglected account of the analytic-synthetic distinction and the revisability of analytic sentences, (b) its connection to his inferentialist account of meaning, and (c) his response to Quine. While Sellars’s account of the revisability of analytic sentences bears certain similarities to Carnap’s and Grice and Strawson’s (...)
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  • Quine’s conflicts with truth deflationism.Teemu Tauriainen - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (46):1-25.
    Compared to the extensive amount of literature on various themes of W.V.O. Quine’s philosophy, his immanent concept of truth remains a relatively unexplored topic. This relative lack of research contributes to a persistent confusion on the deflationary and inflationary details of Quine’s truth. According to a popular reading, Quine’s disquotational definition of the truth predicate exhausts the content of truth, thus amounting to a deflationary view. Others promote opposing interpretations. I argue that by relying on Tarski’s semantic conception of truth, (...)
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  • An infrastructural account of scientific objectivity for legal contexts and bloodstain pattern analysis.W. John Koolage, Lauren M. Williams & Morgen L. Barroso - 2021 - Science in Context 34 (1):101-119.
    ArgumentIn the United States, scientific knowledge is brought before the courts by way of testimony – the testimony of scientific experts. We argue that this expertise is best understoodfirstas related to the quality of the underlying scienceand thenin terms of who delivers it. Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA), a contemporary forensic science, serves as the vaulting point for our exploration of objectivity as a metric for the quality of a science in judicial contexts. We argue that BPA fails to meet the (...)
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  • Philosophy in Science: Some Personal Reflections.Elliott Sober - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):899-907.
    The task of Philosophy in Science (PinS) is to use philosophical tools to help solve scientific problems. This article describes how I stumbled into this line of work and then addressed several topics in philosophy of biology—units of selection, cladistic parsimony, robustness and trade-offs in model building, adaptationism, and evidence for common ancestry—often in collaboration with scientists. I conclude by offering advice for would-be PinS practitioners.
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  • The Root of the Third Dogma of Empiricism: Davidson vs. Quine on Factualism.Ali Hossein Khani - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (1):161-183.
    Davidson has famously argued that conceptual relativism, which, for him, is based on the content-scheme dualism, or the “third dogma” of empiricism, is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting and has accused Quine of holding onto such a dogma. For Davidson, there can be found no intelligible ground for the claim that there may exist untranslatable languages: all languages, if they are languages, are in principle inter-translatable and uttered sentences, if identifiable as utterances, are interpretable. Davidson has also endorsed the Quinean (...)
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  • Confirmation and Meaning Holism Revisited.Timothy Fuller - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1379-1397.
    Does confirmation holism imply meaning holism? A plausible and novel argument, all of whose premises enjoy significant support among contemporary philosophers, links the two theses. This article presents this argument and diagnoses it with a weakness. The weakness illustrates a general difficulty with drawing morals for the nature of ordinary thought and language from claims about the nature of science. The diagnosis is instructive: It suggests more fruitful relations between theories of scientific theory confirmation and semantic theories of our everyday (...)
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  • Mental States Are Like Diseases.Sander Verhaegh - 2019 - In Robert Sinclair (ed.), Science and Sensibilia by W. V. Quine: The 1980 Immanuel Kant Lectures. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
    While Quine’s linguistic behaviorism is well-known, his Kant Lectures contain one of his most detailed discussions of behaviorism in psychology and the philosophy of mind. Quine clarifies the nature of his psychological commitments by arguing for a modest view that is against ‘excessively restrictive’ variants of behaviorism while maintaining ‘a good measure of behaviorist discipline…to keep [our mental] terms under control’. In this paper, I use Quine’s Kant Lectures to reconstruct his position. I distinguish three types of behaviorism in psychology (...)
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  • The Behaviorisms of Skinner and Quine: Genesis, Development, and Mutual Influence.Sander Verhaegh - 2019 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (4):707-730.
    in april 1933, two bright young Ph.D.s were elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows: the psychologist B. F. Skinner and the philosopher/logician W. V. Quine. Both men would become among the most influential scholars of their time; Skinner leads the "Top 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century," whereas philosophers have selected Quine as the most important Anglophone philosopher after the Second World War.1 At the height of their fame, Skinner and Quine became "Edgar Pierce twins"; the latter (...)
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  • Quine on the Indeterminacy of Translation: A Dilemma for Davidson.Ali Hossein Khani - 2018 - Dialectica 72 (1):101-120.
    Davidson has always been explicit in his faithful adherence to the main doctrines of Quine’s philosophy of language, among which the indeterminacy of translation thesis is significant. For Quine, the indeterminacy of translation has considerable ontological consequences, construed as leading to a sceptical conclusion regarding the existence of fine-grained meaning facts. Davidson’s suggested reading of Quine’s indeterminacy arguments seems to be intended to block any such sceptical consequences. According to this reading, Quine’s arguments at most yield the conclusion that there (...)
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  • Ontological Commitment.Daniel Durante Pereira Alves - 2018 - AL-Mukhatabat 1 (27):177-223.
    Disagreement over what exists is so fundamental that it tends to hinder or even to block dialogue among disputants. The various controversies between believers and atheists, or realists and nominalists, are only two kinds of examples. Interested in contributing to the intelligibility of the debate on ontology, in 1939 Willard van Orman Quine began a series of works which introduces the notion of ontological commitment and proposes an allegedly objective criterion to identify the exact conditions under which a theoretical discourse (...)
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  • Linguistic convention and worldly fact: Prospects for a naturalist theory of the a priori.Brett Topey - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (7):1725-1752.
    Truth by convention, once thought to be the foundation of a uniquely promising approach to explaining our access to the truth in nonempirical domains, is nowadays widely considered an absurdity. Its fall from grace has been due largely to the influence of an argument that can be sketched as follows: our linguistic conventions have the power to make it the case that a sentence expresses a particular proposition, but they can’t by themselves generate truth; whether a given proposition is true—and (...)
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  • Working from Within: The Nature and Development of Quine's Naturalism.Sander Verhaegh - 2018 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...)
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  • Pragmatism and the predictive mind.Daniel Williams - 2018 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (5):835-859.
    Predictive processing and its apparent commitment to explaining cognition in terms of Bayesian inference over hierarchical generative models seems to flatly contradict the pragmatist conception of mind and experience. Against this, I argue that this appearance results from philosophical overlays at odd with the science itself, and that the two frameworks are in fact well-poised for mutually beneficial theoretical exchange. Specifically, I argue: first, that predictive processing illuminates pragmatism’s commitment to both the primacy of pragmatic coping in accounts of the (...)
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  • Entiteettien kategorioiden onttisesta statuksesta.Markku Keinänen - 2012 - Maailma.
    This paper (in Finnish) concerns the ontological status of categories of entities. I argue that categories are not be considered as further entities. Rather, it is suffcient for entities belonging to the same category that they are in exactly the same formal ontological relations and have the same general category features.
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  • Quinean holism, analyticity, and diachronic rational norms.Brett Topey - 2018 - Synthese 195 (7):3143-3171.
    I argue that Quinean naturalists’ holism-based arguments against analyticity and apriority are more difficult to resist than is generally supposed, for two reasons. First, although opponents of naturalism sometimes dismiss these arguments on the grounds that the holistic premises on which they depend are unacceptably radical, it turns out that the sort of holism required by these arguments is actually quite minimal. And second, although it’s true, as Grice and Strawson pointed out long ago, that these arguments can succeed only (...)
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  • In Carnap’s Defense: A survey on the concept of a linguistic framework in Carnap’s philosophy.Parzhad Torfehnezhad - 2016 - Abstracta 9 (1):03-30.
    The main task in this paper is to detail and investigate Carnap’s conception of a “linguistic framework”. On this basis, we will see whether Carnap’s dichotomies, such as the analytic-synthetic distinction, are to be construed as absolute/fundamental dichotomies or merely as relative dichotomies. I argue for a novel interpretation of Carnap’s conception of a LF and, on that basis, will show that, according to Carnap, all the dichotomies to be discussed are relative dichotomies; they depend on conventional decisions concerning the (...)
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  • Quine and the Problem of Truth.Joshua Schwartz - 2016 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 4 (10).
    Widespread deflationistic readings of Quine misrepresent his view of disquotation’s significance and the truth predicate’s utility. I demonstrate this by answering a question that philosophers have not directly addressed: how does Quine understand the philosophical problem of truth? A primary thesis of this paper is that we can answer this question only by working from within Quine’s naturalistic framework. Drawing on neglected texts from Quine's corpus, I defend the view that, for Quine, the problem of truth emerges from the development (...)
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  • Historicism, Entrenchment, and Conventionalism.Nathaniel Jason Goldberg - 2009 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 40 (2):259-276.
    W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its historical development. Friedman argues on historicist grounds that mathematical claims serve as principles constitutive of languages within which empirical claims in physics and the (...)
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  • Reichenbach’s cubical universe and the problem of the external world.Elliott Sober - 2011 - Synthese 181 (1):3-21.
    This paper is a sympathetic critique of the argument that Reichenbach develops in Chap. 2 of Experience and Prediction for the thesis that sense experience justifies belief in the existence of an external world. After discussing his attack on the positivist theory of meaning, I describe the probability ideas that Reichenbach presents. I argue that Reichenbach begins with an argument grounded in the Law of Likelihood but that he then endorses a different argument that involves prior probabilities. I try to (...)
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  • Explication as a Method of Conceptual Re-engineering.Georg Brun - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (6):1211-1241.
    Taking Carnap’s classic exposition as a starting point, this paper develops a pragmatic account of the method of explication, defends it against a range of challenges and proposes a detailed recipe for the practice of explicating. It is then argued that confusions are involved in characterizing explications as definitions, and in advocating precising definitions as an alternative to explications. Explication is better characterized as conceptual re-engineering for theoretical purposes, in contrast to conceptual re-engineering for other purposes and improving exactness for (...)
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...)
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  • Hybrid Identities and Just Being Yourself.Gillian Russell - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (4):455-465.
    This paper points out a tension between Agustín Rayo's criteria for singulartermhood and his explicit views on the status of Hybrid Identities, that is, identity statements that use singular terms from two different Systems of Representation, such as "7=Julius Caesar" or more suggestively "I am b" where "b" is a singular term referring to my brain. It argues that non-trivial Hybrid Identities are common and important in philosophy and elsewhere, and it suggests a friendly alternative that involves treating Hybrid Identities (...)
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  • (1 other version)Quine on Objects and De Re Modality.Antti Keskinen - 2012 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 8 (2):4-17.
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  • Katz’s revisability paradox dissolved.Allard Tamminga & Sander Verhaegh - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (4):771-784.
    Quine's holistic empiricist account of scientific inquiry can be characterized by three constitutive principles: *noncontradiction*, *universal revisability* and *pragmatic ordering*. We show that these constitutive principles cannot be regarded as statements within a holistic empiricist's scientific theory of the world. This claim is a corollary of our refutation of Katz's [1998, 2002] argument that holistic empiricism suffers from what he calls the Revisability Paradox. According to Katz, Quine's empiricism is incoherent because its constitutive principles cannot themselves be rationally revised. Using (...)
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  • Doing Philosophy in Style: A New Look at the Analytic/Continental Divide.N. N. Trakakis - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (12):919-942.
    Questions of style are often deemed of marginal importance in philosophy, as well as in metaphilosophical debates concerning the analytic/Continental divide. I take issue with this common tendency by showing how style – suitably conceived not merely as a way of writing, but as a form of expression intimately linked to a form of life – occupies a central role in philosophy. After providing an analysis of the concept of style, I take a fresh look at the analytic/Continental division by (...)
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  • Mentalism versus Behaviourism in Economics: A Philosophy-of-Science Perspective.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2015 - Economics and Philosophy 32 (2):249-281.
    Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are nothing but constructs re-describing people's behaviour. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, on a par with the unobservables in science, such as electrons and electromagnetic fields. While behaviourism has gone out of fashion in psychology, it remains influential in economics, especially in ‘revealed preference’ theory. We defend mentalism in economics, construed as a positive science, and show that it fits best scientific practice. (...)
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  • Objective Probabilities in Number Theory.J. Ellenberg & E. Sober - 2011 - Philosophia Mathematica 19 (3):308-322.
    Philosophers have explored objective interpretations of probability mainly by considering empirical probability statements. Because of this focus, it is widely believed that the logical interpretation and the actual-frequency interpretation are unsatisfactory and the hypothetical-frequency interpretation is not much better. Probabilistic assertions in pure mathematics present a new challenge. Mathematicians prove theorems in number theory that assign probabilities. The most natural interpretation of these probabilities is that they describe actual frequencies in finite sets and limits of actual frequencies in infinite sets. (...)
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  • Quine’s Behaviorism and Linguistic Meaning: Why Quine’s Behaviorism is not Illicit.Tyrus Fisher - 2011 - Philosophia 39 (1):51-59.
    Some of Quine’s critics charge that he arrives at a behavioristic account of linguistic meaning by starting from inappropriately behavioristic assumptions (Kripke 1982, 14; Searle 1987, 123). Quine has even written that this account of linguistic meaning is a consequence of his behaviorism (Quine 1992, 37). I take it that the above charges amount to the assertion that Quine assumes the denial of one or more of the following claims: (1) Language-users associate mental ideas with their linguistic expressions. (2) A (...)
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  • Truth in virtue of meaning.Arthur Sullivan - 2008 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (3):pp. 373-397.
    In recent work on a priori justification, one thing about which there is considerable agreement is that the notion of truth in virtue of meaning is bankrupt and infertile. (For the sake of more readable prose, I will use ‘TVM’ as an abbreviation for ‘the notion of truth in virtue of meaning’.) Arguments against the worth of TVM can be found across the entire spectrum of views on the a priori, in the work of uncompromising rationalists (such as BonJour (1998)), (...)
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  • The analytic/synthetic distinction.Gillian Russell - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (5):712–729.
    Once a standard tool in the epistemologist’s kit, the analytic/synthetic distinction was challenged by Quine and others in the mid-twentieth century and remains controversial today. But although the work of a lot contemporary philosophers touches on this distinction – in the sense that it either has consequences for it, or it assumes results about it – few have really focussed on it recently. This has the consequence that a lot has happened that should affect our view of the analytic/synthetic distinction, (...)
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  • Quine’s Tarskian Angle on Truth: Immanence, Semantic Ascent and the Importance of Generality.Gary Kemp - 2024 - Philosophers' Imprint 24 (1).
    There are two main parts to this article: (1) Quine's view of truth is substantive in a way that is not generally recognized. There are elements in the view of deflationism, minimalism, and of course disquotationalism to be sure, but from Quine's perspective the capacity for generalization - ascribing truth not to explicitly given sentences but to kinds of sentences - requires a full-bore Tarskian apparatus. This is necessary in order for truth to play what for Quine are its vital (...)
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  • Translating Observation Sentences.Martin Montminy - 2022 - Disputatio 14 (67):375-395.
    I argue that pace Quine, indeterminacy of translation affects observation sentences. I illustrate this indeterminacy with examples and show how it is tied to the indeterminacy affecting the analytical status of observation categoricals. I propose my own construal of the thesis of indeterminacy of translation, according to which indeterminacy is based on the inextricability of meaning and belief. I explain why this construal should be favored over Quine’s.
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  • Wittgenstein on necessity: ‘Are you not really an idealist in disguise?’.Sam W. A. Couldrick - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy 65 (2):162-186.
    Wittgenstein characterises ‘necessary truths’ as rules of representation that do not answer to reality. The invocation of rules of representation has led many to compare his work with Kant's. This comparison is illuminating, but it can also be misleading. Some go as far as casting Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a specie of transcendental idealism, an interpretation that continues to gather support despite scholars pointing to its limitations. To understand the temptation of this interpretation, attention must be paid to a distinction (...)
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  • Underdetermination, holism, and feminist philosophy of science.Lynn Hankinson Nelson - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-12.
    Appeals to some thesis of underdetermination, to the idea that scientific theories and hypotheses are not entailed by the evidence that supports them, are common in feminist philosophy of science. These appeals seek to understand and explain how androcentrism and other problematic approaches to gender have found their way into good science, as well as the reverse – how feminist approaches to gender and science that are also value-laden, can contribute to good science. Focusing on W.V. Quine’s positions on holism (...)
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  • Carnap, Quine, and the humean condition.Sean Morris - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13283-13312.
    In his “Epistemology Naturalized,” Quine embraces a form of Humeanism. In this paper, I try to work out the significance of this Humeanism. In particular, I argue that it represents an anti-metaphysical position that Quine shares with Carnap. Crucial to my account is that contrary to much contemporary thinking on metaphysics, Carnap, and Quine following him, recognize both an ontological and an epistemological sense of metaphysics. As commentators have frequently acknowledged, Carnap and Quine disagree over rejecting metaphysics in the ontological (...)
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  • From Shared Stimuli to Preestablished Harmony: The Development of Quine’s Thinking on Intersubjectivity and Objective Validity.Reto Gubelmann - 2019 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (2):343-370.
    W. V. O. Quine is generally seen as one of the foremost empiricists of the twentieth century. For large parts of his career, the label “empiricist” is accurate; in his mature work, however, he integrated decidedly antiempiricist elements in his epistemology. From The Roots of Reference onward, he enlists natural selection and innate cognitive structures to ensure that scientific concepts have a “degree of objective validity.” From From Stimulus to Science onward, he also explains the very possibility of communication via (...)
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  • The Early Formation of Modal Logic and its Significance: A Historical Note on Quine, Carnap, and a Bit of Church.Adam Tamas Tuboly - 2018 - History and Philosophy of Logic 39 (3):289-304.
    The aim of the paper is to show that W. V. O. Quine's animadversions against modal logic did not get the same attention that is considered to be the case nowadays. The community of logicians focused solely on the technical aspects of C. I. Lewis’ systems and did not take Quine's arguments and remarks seriously—or at least seriously enough to respond. In order to assess Quine's place in the history, however, his relation to Carnap is considered since their notorious break (...)
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  • ‘‘Quine’s Evolution from ‘Carnap’s Disciple’ to the Author of “Two Dogmas.Greg Frost-Arnold - 2011 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1 (2):291-316.
    Recent scholarship indicates that Quine’s “Truth by Convention” does not present the radical critiques of analytic truth found fifteen years later in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” This prompts a historical question: what caused Quine’s radicalization? I argue that two crucial components of Quine’s development can be traced to the academic year 1940–1941, when he, Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Hempel, and Goodman were all at Harvard together. First, during those meetings, Quine recognizes that Carnap has abandoned the extensional, syntactic approach to philosophical (...)
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  • The revisability paradox.Jonathan Adler - 2003 - Philosophical Forum 34 (3-4):383–390.
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  • Grammar and analyticity: Wittgenstein and the logical positivists on logical and conceptual truth.Kai Michael Büttner - 2023 - Philosophical Investigations 46 (2):196-220.
    Wittgenstein's conception of logical and conceptual truth is often thought to rival that of the logical positivists. This paper argues that there are important respects in which these conceptions complement each other. Analyticity, in the positivists' sense, coincides, not with Wittgenstein's notion of a grammatical proposition, but rather with his notion of a tautology. Grammatical propositions can usually be construed as analyticity postulates in Carnap's sense of the term. This account of grammatical and analytic propositions will be illustrated by appeal (...)
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  • Carnap and Quine: Analyticity, Naturalism, and the Elimination of Metaphysics.Sean Morris - 2018 - The Monist 101 (4):394-416.
    Rudolf Carnap is well known for his attack on metaphysics, and W. V. Quine is equally well known for his attack on Carnap’s analytic/synthetic distinction. Receiving far less attention is their basic agreement that a properly scientific approach to philosophy should eliminate the metaphysical excesses of the past. This paper aims to remedy this. It focuses initially on the development of Carnap’s rejection of metaphysics from 1932 to 1950 and the role that analyticity plays. It then turns to Quine, emphasizing (...)
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  • (2 other versions)The Rationalist Reply to Fodor's Analyticity and Circularity Challenge.Víctor M. Verdejo - 2013 - Theoria 28 (1):7-25.
    The Fodorian central objections to Inferential Role Semantics can be taken to include an ‘Analyticity Challenge’ and a ‘Circularity Challenge’, which are ultimately challenges to IRS explanations of concept possession. In this paper I present inferential role theories, critically examine these challenges and point out two misunderstandings to which they are exposed. I then state in detail a rationalist version of IRS and argue that this version meets head on the Fodorian challenges. If sound, these considerations show that there is (...)
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  • Predictive Processing and the Representation Wars.Daniel Williams - 2018 - Minds and Machines 28 (1):141-172.
    Clark has recently suggested that predictive processing advances a theory of neural function with the resources to put an ecumenical end to the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. In this paper I defend and develop this suggestion. First, I broaden the representation wars to include three foundational challenges to representational cognitive science. Second, I articulate three features of predictive processing’s account of internal representation that distinguish it from more orthodox representationalist frameworks. Specifically, I argue that it posits a resemblance-based (...)
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  • Evidential Holism and Indispensability Arguments.Joe Morrison - 2012 - Erkenntnis 76 (2):263-278.
    The indispensability argument is a method for showing that abstract mathematical objects exist. Various versions of this argument have been proposed. Lately, commentators seem to have agreed that a holistic indispensability argument will not work, and that an explanatory indispensability argument is the best candidate. In this paper I argue that the dominant reasons for rejecting the holistic indispensability argument are mistaken. This is largely due to an overestimation of the consequences that follow from evidential holism. Nevertheless, the holistic indispensability (...)
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  • Contextual definition and ontological commitment.Dirk Greimann - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3):357 – 373.
    In almost all of his writings on ontology, Quine celebrated the discovery of contextual definition as a milestone of the history of philosophy. The philosophical appeal of this tool resides in the hope that it allows us to reduce the ontological commitments of theories in substantial ways. The goal of this paper is to show that contextual definition does not really come up to this hope. It is argued that the material adequacy of such definitions presupposes a very strong context-principle, (...)
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  • It Takes More than Moore to Answer Existence-Questions.Karl Egerton - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (2):355-366.
    Several recent discussions of metaphysics disavow existence-questions, claiming that they are metaphysically uninteresting because trivially settled in the affirmative by Moorean facts. This is often given as a reason to focus metaphysical debate instead on questions of grounding. I argue that the strategy employed to undermine existence-questions fails against its usual target: Quineanism. The Quinean can protest that the formulation given of their position is a straw man: properly understood, as a project of explication, Quinean metaphysics does not counsel us (...)
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  • Les deux formes de la thèse de Church-Turing et l’épistémologie du calcul.Maël Pégny - 2012 - Philosophia Scientiae 16 (3):39-67.
    La thèse de Church-Turing stipule que toute fonction calculable est calculable par une machine de Turing. En distinguant, à la suite de nombreux auteurs, une forme algorithmique de la thèse de Church-Turing portant sur les fonctions calculables par un algorithme d’une forme empirique de cette même thèse, portant sur les fonctions calculables par une machine, il devient possible de poser une nouvelle question : les limites empiriques du calcul sont-elles identiques aux limites des algorithmes? Ou existe-t-il un moyen empirique d’effectuer (...)
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  • Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World. [REVIEW]Christopher Pincock - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (6):951-961.
    This article aims to give an overview of Carnap’s 1928 book Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau and the most influential interpretations of its significance. After giving an outline of the book in Section 2, I turn to the first sustained interpretations of the book offered by Goodman and Quine in Section 3. Section 4 explains how this empirical reductionist interpretation was largely displaced by its main competitor. This is the line of interpretation offered by Friedman and Richardson which (...)
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  • Paraphrase Strategies in Metaphysics.Tatjana von Solodkoff - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (8):570-582.
    Philosophers often aim to demonstrate that the things we ordinarily think and say can be reconciled with our considered beliefs about the world. To this end, many philosophers try to paraphrase ordinary language claims by finding equivalent sentences that are less misleading. For instance, though we know that there is no British family that is the average one, we want to say that the average British family has 1.8 children, and we might do that by paraphrasing this claim as: there (...)
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