Laudan constructs a fresh approach to a longtime problem for the philosopher of science: how to explain the simultaneous and widespread presence of both agreement and disagreement in science. Laudan critiques the logical empiricists and the post-positivists as he stresses the need for centrality and values and the interdependence of values, methods, and facts as prerequisites to solving the problems of consensus and dissent in science.

The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of justified belief. What I have in mind is an explanatory theory, one that explains in a general way why certain beliefs are counted as justified and others as unjustified. Unlike some traditional approaches, I do not try to prescribe standards for justification that differ from, or improve upon, our ordinary standards. I merely try to explicate the ordinary standards, which are, I believe, quite different from those of many classical, (...) e. g., ‘Cartesian’, accounts. (shrink)

This review of recent work in the philosophy of science motivated by a commitment to 'naturalism' begins by identifying three key axioms and one theorem shared by philosophers thus self-styled. Owing much to Quine and Ernest Nagel, these philosophers of science share a common agenda with naturalists elsewhere in philosophy. But they have disagreed among themselves about how the axioms and the theorems they share settle long-standing disputes in the philosophy of science. After expounding these disagreements in the work of (...) Boyd, Giere, Laudan, and Kitcher, I argue that naturalism needs to look for more than mere consistency in its foundations. (shrink)

Our only channel of information about the world is the impact of external forces on our sensory surfaces. So says science itself. There is no clairvoyance. How, then, can we have parlayed this meager sensory input into a full-blown scientific theory of the world? This is itself a scientific question. The pursuit of it, with free use of scientific theory, is what I call naturalized epistemology. The Roots of Reference falls within that domain. Its more specific concern, within that domain, (...) is reference to concrete and abstract objects: what such reference consists in, and how we achieve it. (shrink)

Quintessence for the first time collects Quine's classic essays (such as "Two Dogmas" and "On What There Is") in one volume—and thus offers readers a much ...

Hilary Kornblith argues for a naturalistic approach to investigating knowledge. Knowledge, he explains, is a feature of the natural world, and so should be investigated using scientific methods. He offers an account of knowledge derived from the science of animal behavior, and defends this against its philosophical rivals. This controversial and refreshingly original book offers philosophers a new way to do epistemology.

" This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth ...

Introduction Quine was born in. He studied as a graduate student at Harvard, and apart from short visits to Oxford, Paris and other centres of learning, ...

1 Knowledge and Justification This book is an investigation of one central problem which arises in the attempt to give a philosophical account of empirical ...

Questions about necessity (or what has to be, or what cannot be otherwise) and possibility (or what can be, or what could be otherwise) are questions about modality. Fictionalism is an approach to theoretical matters in a given area which treats the claims in that area as being in some sense analogous to fictional claims: claims we do not literally accept at face value, but which we nevertheless think serve some useful function. However, despite its name, “Modal Fictionalism” in its (...) usual manifestations is not primarily fictionalism about claims of necessity and possibility, but rather a fictionalist approach to claims about possible worlds. (For instance, modal fictionalism is not normally fictionalist about the claim that “it is possible that there be a species of tail-less kangaroo”, but rather about the claim that “there is a possible world in which there is a species of tail-less kangaroo”.) The practice of taking possible worlds to be merely convenient fictions, or of treating talk about possible worlds as being useful without being literally correct, is quite common in philosophical circles. It is only recently, however, that philosophers have seriously examined the implications of taking possible worlds to be merely fictional objects, like Sherlock Holmes or a frictionless surface. (shrink)

This paper analyzes and evaluates quine's influential thesis that epistemology should become a chapter of empirical psychology. quine's main point, it is argued, is that normativity must be banished from epistemology and, more generally, philosophy. i claim that without a normative concept of justification, we lose the very concept of knowledge, and that belief ascription itself becomes impossible without a normative concept of rationality. further, the supervenience of concepts of epistemic appraisal shows that normative epistemology is indeed possible.

I clarify a widely accepted form of contemporary naturalism and argue that supervenient physicalism should not be considered an option for those who embrace this version of naturalism. Among other things, my thesis implies that if there are insuperable difficulties for strict physicalism, then the move toward supervenience views of the mind/body problem amounts to an abandonment of this version of naturalism and not a minor adjustment of it. More precisely, my argument is this: strict physicalism excludes both substance and (...) property or event dualism. But the supervenience thesis entails some form of property or event dualism. So strict physicalism excludes the supervenience thesis. Moreover, given the nature of a widely accepted contemporary understanding of naturalism, it is best construed along strict physicalist lines and naturalists of this persuasion should not be supervenient physicalists. To make my case, I offer a characterization of a ubiquitous version of contemporary naturalism followed by an analysis of the most plausible version of supervenient physicalism consistent with this form of naturalism. I then try to show why this version of supervenient physicalism should not be an option for a naturalist of a certain persuasion. (shrink)

If the mental is subject to indeterminacy, does this rule out the possibility of psychophysical laws? One might think so. However, Jaegwon Kim has argued for the existence of a kind of psychophysical law that is not obviously susceptible to problems posed by indeterminacy. I begin by introducing a weak and relatively uncontroversial indeterminacy thesis. Then, by appealing to constraints on theories of strong supervenience and to general considerations about the nature of indeterminacy, I argue that even Kim’s laws cannot (...) accommodate indeterminacy. The result is an argument against the possibility of Kim‐Style psychophysical laws. (shrink)

"This is a fine volume that clarifies, defends, and moves beyond the views that Kim presented in Mind in a Physical World.

Now in a new edition, this volume updates Davidson's exceptional Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), which set out his enormously influential philosophy of language. The original volume remains a central point of reference, and a focus of controversy, with its impact extending into linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Addressing a central question--what it is for words to mean what they do--and featuring a previously uncollected, additional essay, this work will appeal to a wide audience of philosophers, linguists, (...) and psychologists. (shrink)

If the mental is subject to indeterminacy, does this rule out the possibility of psychophysical laws? One might think so. However, Jaegwon Kim has argued for the existence of a kind of psychophysical law that is not obviously susceptible to problems posed by indeterminacy. I begin by introducing a weak and relatively uncontroversial indeterminacy thesis. Then, by appealing to constraints on theories of strong supervenience and to general considerations about the nature of indeterminacy, I argue that even Kim’s laws cannot (...) accommodate indeterminacy. The result is an argument against the possibility of Kim‐Style psychophysical laws. (shrink)

A striking feature of the contemporary philosophical scene is the flourishing of a number of research programs aimed in one way or another at making intentional soup out of nonintentional bones—more carefully, specifying in a resolutely nonintentional, nonsemantic vocabulary, sufficient conditions for states of an organism or other system to qualify as contentful representations. This is a movement with a number of players, but for my purposes here, the work of Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan can serve as paradigms. The enterprise (...) in which they are jointly engaged is not so much one of conceptual analysis as it has been traditionally understood as one of conceptual engineering. That is, instead of thinking about what ordinary people or even sophisticated philosophers already mean by terms such as ‘representation’, they appeal to the tools of the special sciences to describe abstractly, but in criticizable detail, how one might craft a situation in which some state arguably deserves to be characterized as ‘representationally contentful’ in various important senses. Insofar as the theories are good ones, they may shed light on how human knowers actually work. But their immediate aim is a broader one: to say what would count as doing the trick, rather than how we manage to do it. (shrink)