The paper explores the existential import of universal affirmative in Descartes, Arnauld and Malebranche. Descartes holds, inconsistently, that eternal truths are true even if the subject term is empty but that a proposition with a false idea as subject is false. Malebranche extends Descartes? truth-conditions for eternal truths, which lack existential import, to all knowledge, allowing only for non-propositional knowledge of contingent existence. Malebranche's rather implausible Neoplatonic semantics is detailed as consisting of three key semantic relations: illumination by which God's (...) ideas cause mental terms, creation by which God's ideas cause material substances by a kind of ?ontic privation?, and sensation in which brain events occasion states of mental awareness. In contrast, Arnauld distinguishes two types of propositions ? necessary and contingent ? with distinct truth-conditions, one with and one without existential import. Arnauld's more modern semantics is laid out as a theory of reference that substitutes earlier causal accounts with one that adapts the medieval notion of objective being. His version anticipates modern notions of intentional content and appeals in its ontology only to substances and their modes. (shrink)

Scientific representation: A long journey from pragmatics to pragmatics Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9465-5 Authors James Ladyman, Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, 9 Woodland Rd, Bristol, BS8 1TB UK Otávio Bueno, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA Mauricio Suárez, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, Complutense University of Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain Bas C. van Fraassen, Philosophy Department, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA Journal Metascience Online (...) ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

Some questions are posed for van Fraassen, concerning the role and status of metaphysics in his Scientific Representation.

In place of earlier instrumentalist and phenomenalist interpretations of science both Quine and Sellars have developed highly influential realist positions centering around the doctrine that accepting a theory as explanatory and irreducible rationally entails accepting the entities posited by the theory. A growing reaction against this realism is partially based on perceived inadequacies in the doctrines of Quine and Sellars, but even more on reconstructions of scientific explanations which do not involve such ontic commitments. Three types of anti-realistic positions are (...) considered and criticized. Hesse's neo-Duhemian position couples a statistical theory of inference to a downgrading of purely theoretical statements. Sneed uses the method of axiomatrization through set-theoretic predicates to supply a reconstruction of Kuhn's account of scientific development. Here Ramsey-reduction sentences serve to eliminate purely theoretical terms. The longest section deals with van Fraassen's semantic model based on a state-space representation of scientific theories and the use of this model in interpreting quantum mechanics. It is argued that the model is valuable, but that the anti-realist interpretation accorded it is not justified and entails serious inconsistencies. (shrink)

The standard approach to model how human beings understand natural languages is the symbolic, compositional approach according to which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its constituents. In other words, meaning plays a fundamental role in the model. In this work, because of the polysemous, flexible, dynamic, and contextual structure of natural languages, this approach is rejected. Instead, a connectionist model which eliminates the concept of meaning is proposed.

It has become apparent that the debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists has come to a stalemate. Neither view can reasonably claim to be the most rational philosophy of science, exclusively capable of making sense of all scientific activities. On one prominent analysis of the situation, whether we accept a realist or an anti-realist account of science actually seems to depend on which values we antecedently accept, rather than our commitment to “rationality” per se. Accordingly, several philosophers have attempted (...) to argue in favour of scientific realism or constructive empiricism by showing that one set of values is exclusively best, for anyone and everyone, and that the downstream choice of the philosophy of science which best serves those values is therefore best, for anyone and everyone. These efforts, however, seem to have failed. In response, I suggest that philosophers of science should suspend the effort to determine which philosophy of science is best for everyone, and instead begin investigating which philosophy of science is best for specific people, with specific values, in specific contexts. I illustrate how this might be done by briefly sketching a single case study from the history of science, which seems to show that different philosophies of science are better at motivating different forms of scientific practice. (shrink)

A “conceptual spaces” approach is used to formalize Aristotle’s main intuitions about time and change, and other ideas about temporal points of view. That approach has been used in earlier studies about points of view. Properties of entities are represented by locations in multidimensional conceptual spaces; and concepts of entities are identified with subsets or regions of conceptual spaces. The dimensions of the spaces, called “determinables”, are qualities in a very general sense. A temporal element is introduced by adding a (...) time variable to state functions that map entities into conceptual spaces. That way, states may have some permanency or stability around time instances. Following Aristotle’s intuitions, changes and events will not be necessarily instant phenomena, instead they could be processual and interval dependent. Change is defined relatively to the interval during which the change is taking place. Time intervals themselves are taken to represent points of view. To have a point of view is to look at the world as it is in the selected interval. Many important concepts are relativized to intervals, for instance change, events, identity, ontology, potentiality, etc. The definition of points of view as intervals allows to compare points of view in relation to all these concepts. The conceptual space approach has an immediate semantic and structural character, but it is tempting to develop also logics to describe them. A formal language is introduced to show how this could be done. (shrink)

Many familiar forms of property realism identify properties with sui generis ontological categories like universals or tropes and posit a fundamental instantiation relation that unifies objects with their properties. In this paper, I develop and defend locationism, which identifies properties with locations and holds that the occupation relation that unifies objects with their locations also unifies objects with their properties. Along with the theoretical parsimony that locationism enjoys, I argue that locationism resolves a puzzle for actualists regarding the ontological status (...) of uninstantiated properties. I also note some promising applications of the locationist framework to the metaphysics of quantities and possible worlds. (shrink)

Wilfred Sellars appears in Bas C. van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image as one of van Fraassen’s primary realist opponents. However, little attention has been paid to Sellars’s influence on van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism and van Fraassen’s criticisms of Sellarsian realism, despite the significant impact of The Scientific Image on the realism debate and recent renewed interest in Sellars’s scientific realism. In the first half of this article, I argue that reading The Scientific Image against a Sellarsian background helps clarify and (...) justify van Fraassen’s controversial characterization of scientific realism. Sellars and van Fraassen each inhabit a recognizable position in the other’s description of the realism debate and can reciprocally recognize the other as inhabiting the opposing position. The second half of this article reconstructs van Fraassen’s objections to Sellarsian realism in The Scientific Image and its precursors. I argue that van Fraassen’s criticisms of Sellarsian realism significantly developed between his 1975 paper, “Wilfrid Sellars on Scientific Realism” and his 1980 book. (shrink)

This thesis advances and defends a novel two-category ontology of objects and dimensions, latterly conceived as respects of comparability. The proposed 'dimensionist' ontology is set out and brought to bear on discussions of determinables and determinates, the problem of universals, fact ontologies, and nomic governance. Dimensionism is argued to fare well in comparison to a range of rival ontological accounts of property possession. A metametaphysical framework is set out to undergird the discussion, which draws on both realist and pragmatist resources.

Scientific inquiry has led to immense explanatory and technological successes, partly as a result of the pervasiveness of scientific theories. Relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and plate tectonics were, and continue to be, wildly successful families of theories within physics, biology, and geology. Other powerful theory clusters inhabit comparatively recent disciplines such as cognitive science, climate science, molecular biology, microeconomics, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). Effective scientific theories magnify understanding, help supply legitimate explanations, and assist in formulating predictions. Moving from their (...) knowledge-producing representational functions to their interventional roles (Hacking 1983), theories are integral to building technologies used within consumer, industrial, and scientific milieus. -/- This entry explores the structure of scientific theories from the perspective of the Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Views. Each of these views answers questions such as the following in unique ways. What is the best characterization of the composition and function of scientific theory? How is theory linked with world? Which philosophical tools can and should be employed in describing and reconstructing scientific theory? Is an understanding of practice and application necessary for a comprehension of the core structure of a scientific theory? How are these three views ultimately related? (shrink)

This paper develops the first parts of a logical framework for the empirical sciences, by means of a redefinition of theory structuralism as originally developed by Joseph Sneed, Wolfgang Stegmüller, and others, in the context of a ‘rigid’ logic as based on a fixed (therefore rigid) ontology. The paper defends a formal conception of the empirical sciences that has an irreducible ontological basis and is unable, in general, to provide purely structural characterizations of the domain of a theory. The extreme (...) rationalist utopia of a characterization of the real world ‘up to isomorphism’, therefore, is rejected. (shrink)

It has often been suggested that the meaning of terms is theory dependent. Bas van Fraassen has proposed a particular way of inferring which sentences are true in virtue of meaning, given a theory in so-called state-space format. I examine his claims by means of simple examples.

Philosophical issues often turn into logic. That is certainly true of Moore’s Paradox, which tends to appear and reappear in many philosophical contexts. There is no doubt that its study belongs to pragmatics rather than semantics or syntax. But it is also true that issues in pragmatics can often be studied fruitfully by attending to their projection, so to speak, onto the levels of semantics or syntax — just in the way that problems in spherical geometry are often illuminated by (...) the study of projections onto a plane. To begin I will describe a potentially vast landscape of logics of a certain form, with some illustrations of how they appear naturally in response to some problems in philosophical logic. Then I will turn Moore’s Paradox into logic, within that landscape, and show how far it can be illuminated therein. (shrink)

The symmetries of a physical theory are often associated with two things: conservation laws and representational redundancies. But how can a physical theory's symmetries give rise to interesting conservation laws, if symmetries are transformations that correspond to no genuine physical difference? In this article, I argue for a disambiguation in the notion of symmetry. The central distinction is between what I call "analytic" and "synthetic" symmetries, so called because of an analogy with analytic and synthetic propositions. "Analytic" symmetries are the (...) turning of idle wheels in a theory's formalism, and correspond to no physical change; "synthetic" symmetries cover all the rest. I argue that analytic symmetries are distinguished because they act as fixed points or constraints in any interpretation of a theory, and as such are akin to Poincaré's conventions or Reichenbach's 'axioms of co-ordination', or 'relativized constitutive a priori principles'. (shrink)

The positivistic Received View construed scientific theories syntactically as axiomatic calculi where theoretical terms were given a partial semantic interpretation via correspondence rules connecting them to observation statements. This paper assesses what, with hindsight, seem the most important defects in the Received View; surveys the main proposed successor analyses to the Received View--various Semantic Conception versions and the Structuralist Analysis; evaluates how well they avoid those defects; examines what new problems they face and where the most promising require further development (...) or leave unanswered questions; explores implications of recent work on models for understanding theories; and rebuts the few criticisms of the Semantic Conception that have surfaced. (shrink)

A basic aim of E. Beth's work in philosophy of science was to explore the use of formal semantic methods in the analysis of physical theories. We hope to show that a general framework for Beth's semantic analysis is provided by the theory of semi-interpreted languages, introduced in a previous paper. After developing Beth's analysis of nonrelativistic physical theories in a more general form, we turn to the notion of the 'logic' of a physical theory. Here we prove a result (...) concerning the conditions under which semantic entailment in such a theory is finitary. We argue, finally, that Beth's approach provides a characterization of physical theory which is more faithful to current practice in foundational research in the sciences than the familiar picture of a partly interpreted axiomatic theory. (shrink)

Points of view are a central phenomenon in human cognition. Although the concept of point of view is ambiguous, there exist common elements in different notions. A point of view is a certain way to look at things around us. In conceptual points of view, things are looked at or interpreted through conceptual lenses. Conceptual points of view are important for epistemology, cognitive science, and philosophy of science. In this article, a new method to formalize conceptual points of view is (...) introduced. It is based on the conceptual space approach, where concepts are regions of multi-dimensional quality spaces. Points of view, as defined in this article, consist of a selection of relevant dimensions, referred to here as determinables, and of a certain supposition, referred to here as a theory, about the subject content. After considering some early efforts to formalize points of view, the notion of conceptual space is defined and explored. One concept of point of view is defined and developed in the framework of conceptual space, and a new logic for points of view is also outlined. The problem of mind–body correlation is discussed as an example of the application of the notion of points of view. To conclude, the meaning and applications of the new concepts and tools developed in the article are discussed. (shrink)

Approaches to the interpretation of physical theories provide accounts of how physical meaning accrues to the mathematical structure of a theory. According to many standard approaches to interpretation, meaning relations are captured by maps from the mathematical structure of the theory to statements expressing its empirical content. In this article I argue that while such accounts adequately address meaning relations when exact models are available or perturbation theory converges, they do not fare as well for models that give rise to (...) divergent perturbative expansions. Since truncations of divergent perturbative expansions often play a critical role in establishing the empirical adequacy of a theory, this is a serious deficiency. I show how to augment state-space semantics, a view developed by Beth and van Fraassen, to capture perturbatively evaluated observables even in cases where perturbation theory is divergent. This new semantics establishes a sense in which the calculations that underwrite the empirical adequacy of a theory are both meaningful and true, but requires departure from the assumption that physical meaning is captured entirely by the exact models of a theory. (shrink)

It has seemed natural to model phenomena related to vagueness in terms of graded membership. However, so far no satisfactory answer has been given to the question of what graded membership is nor has any attempt been made to describe in detail a procedure for determining degrees of membership. We seek to remedy these lacunae by building on recent work on typicality and graded membership in cognitive science and combining some of the results obtained there with a version of the (...) conceptual spaces framework. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the origin, intellectual development and use of a semantic variant of the idea of logical space found implicitly in Kant and explicitly in early Wittgenstein and van Fraassen. It elucidates the idea of logical space as the idea of images or pictures representative of reality organized into a logico-mathematical structure circumscribing a form of all possible worlds. Its main claim is that application of these images or pictures to reality is through a certain conception of self. The (...) first chapter presents a novel interpretation of Kant’s semantic theory of schemata in the Critique of Pure Reason, showing that a structure of the imagination induced by the transcendental self informs an implicit idea of logical space. The second chapter offers an intellectual history of the idea through developments in the organization of images introduced by Helmholtz and Hertz. The third chapter reveals early Wittgenstein’s idea of logical space to be his notion of the self, demonstrating how this serves to unify propositions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerning solipsism, realism, ethics, aesthetics and mysticism with those pertaining to the picture theory of meaning. The fourth chapter provides a historical overview of the development of van Fraassen’s empiricism in relation to his adaptation of logical space, and evaluates his recent proposal in Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective that the problem of coordination in the semantic view of theories is dissolved through self-location in logical space. After identifying a number of problems this proposal creates for his empiricism, a brief suggestion is made about how van Fraassen might improve upon his conception of logical space, and how an empiricist view of scientific representation might be understood as a result. (shrink)

In several recent papers ([7], [8]) Bas van Fraassen has suggested that the structure of a scientific theory might be more appropriately represented by his “semantic view of theories” than by the traditional “syntactic view.” Under the syntactic view, to characterize a theory one provides “a finite list of sentences given to count as axioms, plus a finite set of syntactic transformations, of an effective character, given to generate the set of all theorems from these axioms.” ([8], p. 305) The (...) set of all such theorems is identified with the theory, and contains the set of all claims made by the theory about physical systems. Under the semantic approach, however, one “does not view a physical theory as… a kind of Principia Mathematica cum nonlogical postulates.” ([7], p. 337) Rather, “all the resources of mathematical English” are used to construct a theoretical framework, and “the theoretical reasoning of the physicist is viewed as ordinary mathematical reasoning concerning this framework.”. (shrink)