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 (...) purely practical reasons. Finally, three limitations which call for further development of the method of explication are discussed. (shrink)

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Existence questions have been topics for heated debates in metaphysics, but this book argues that they can often be answered easily, by trivial inferences from uncontroversial premises. This 'easy' approach to ontology leads to realism about disputed entities, and to the view that metaphysical disputes about existence questions are misguided.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Logik der Fragen" verfügbar.

Obwohl das Explizieren von Begriffen wesentlicher Bestandteil der philosophischen Theoriebildung ist, finden sich nur wenige Arbeiten, die der Frage nachgehen, nach welchen methodischen Regeln diese Kunst auszuüben ist. Die vorliegende Arbeit will zur Schließung dieser Lücke beitragen. Es wird eine allgemeine Theorie der Begriffsexplikation skizziert, die an Vorarbeiten anknüpft, die von Geo Siegwart in neueren Schriften geleistet wurden. Die hauptsächlichen Ziele der Theorie sind: die adäquate Explikation von „Explikation“; die Bestimmung der Faktoren, von denen die Adäquatheit einer Explikation abhängt, wie (...) z.B. die materiale Adäquatheit der Explikation und die Adäquatheit der Normen wissenschaftlicher Respektabilität, denen das Explikandum angepasst werden soll; und der Aufbau eines entsprechenden Systems von Regeln, deren Befolgung die Adäquatheit von Explikationen sicherstellen soll. Diese Regeln normieren das Explizieren in ähnlicher Weise wie die logischen Regeln das Schlussfolgern. (shrink)

What sets the practice of rigorously tested, sound science apart from pseudoscience? In this volume, the contributors seek to answer this question, known to philosophers of science as “the demarcation problem.” This issue has a long history in philosophy, stretching as far back as the early twentieth century and the work of Karl Popper. But by the late 1980s, scholars in the field began to treat the demarcation problem as impossible to solve and futile to ponder. However, the essays that (...) Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry have assembled in this volume make a rousing case for the unequivocal importance of reflecting on the separation between pseudoscience and sound science. (shrink)

Was ist Wahrheit? Zufolge welcher Standards erkennt man, was wahr oder falsch ist? Wie lassen sich derartige Kriterien rechtfertigen? Die vornehmlich durch die Wende zur Sprache und die Ausbildung einer Metatheorie der analytischen Wissenschaften geprägte neuere Erörterung dieser Hauptfragen zur Wahrheit führt auf Vorfragen: Von welchen Gebilden sagen wir in welcher Weise, sie seien wahr oder falsch? Was sind und was leisten Definitionen, Kriterien, Regeln, Bedingungen der Wahrheit und Falschheit? Die vorliegende Schrift entfaltet einen systematischen Rahmen, in dem die Vorfragen (...) zur Wahrheit beantwortet und die Hauptfragen in neuer Weise organisiert werden. (shrink)

Abstract Recent criticisms of intuition from experimental philosophy and elsewhere have helped undermine the authority of traditional conceptual analysis. As the product of more empirically informed philosophical methodology, this result is compelling and philosophically salutary. But the negative critiques rarely suggest a positive alternative. In particular, a normative account of concept determination—how concepts should be characterized—is strikingly absent from such work. Carnap's underappreciated theory of explication provides such a theory. Analyses of complex concepts in empirical sciences illustrates and supports this (...) claim, and counteracts the charge explication is only suitable for highly mathematical, axiomatic contexts. Explication is also defended against the influential criticism it is “philosophically unilluminating”. Content Type Journal Article Category Original paper in Philosophy of Science Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s13194-011-0027-5 Authors James Justus, Philosophy Department, Florida State University and University of Sydney, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA Journal European Journal for Philosophy of Science Online ISSN 1879-4920 Print ISSN 1879-4912. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to make two main points. The first point is methodological: Instead of attempting to give a classical analysis or reductive definition of the term “expertise”, we should attempt an explication and look for what may be called symptoms of expertise. What this comes to will be explained in due course. My second point is substantial: I want to recommend understanding as an important symptom of expertise. In order to give this suggestion content, I begin to (...) develop an account of understanding. Finally, I will draw attention to some consequences of this approach. (shrink)

Using a short excerpt from Anselm's Responsio as an example, this paper tries to present logical reconstruction as a special type of exegetical interpretation by paraphrase that is subject to (adapted) hermeneutic maxims and presumption rules that govern exegetical interpretation in general. As such, logical reconstruction will be distinguished from the non-interpretative enterprise of formalization and from the development of theories of logical form, which provide a framework in which formalization and reconstruction take place. Yet, even though logical reconstruction is (...) dependent on methods of formalization, it allows us to use formal methods for the analysis and assessment of natural language texts that are not readily formalizable and is thus an important tool when it comes to applying the concepts and methods of formal logic to such texts. (shrink)

Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens / von Dr. Gottlob Frege,...Date de l'edition originale : 1879Ce livre est la reproduction fidele d'une oeuvre publiee avant 1920 et fait partie d'une collection de livres reimprimes a la demande editee par Hachette Livre, dans le cadre d'un partenariat avec la Bibliotheque nationale de France, offrant l'opportunite d'acceder a des ouvrages anciens et souvent rares issus des fonds patrimoniaux de la BnF.Les oeuvres faisant partie de cette collection ont ete numerisees (...) par la BnF et sont presentes sur Gallica, sa bibliotheque numerique.En entreprenant de redonner vie a ces ouvrages au travers d'une collection de livres reimprimes a la demande, nous leur donnons la possibilite de rencontrer un public elargi et participons a la transmission de connaissances et de savoirs parfois difficilement accessibles.Nous avons cherche a concilier la reproduction fidele d'un livre ancien a partir de sa version numerisee avec le souci d'un confort de lecture optimal. Nous esperons que les ouvrages de cette nouvelle collection vous apporteront entiere satisfaction.Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.hachettebnf.frhttp://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65658c. (shrink)

The method of explication has been somewhat of a hot topic in the last 10 years. Despite the multifaceted research that has been directed at the issue, one may perceive a lack of step-by-step procedural or structural accounts of explication. This paper aims at providing a structural account of the method of explication in continuation of the works of Geo Siegwart. It is enhanced with a detailed terminology for the assessment and comparison of explications. The aim is to provide means (...) to talk about explications including their criticisms and their interrelations. There is hope that this treatment will be able to serve as a foundation to a step-by-step guide to be established for explicators. At least it should help to frame and mediate explicative disputes. In closing the enterprise will be considered an explication of ‘explication’, though consecutive explications improving on this one are undoubtedly conceivable. (shrink)

Available for the first time in 20 years, here are two important works from the 1920s by the best-known representative of the Vienna Circle.

This encyclopedia article provides a procedural account of explication outlining each step that is part of the overall explicative effort (2). It is prefaced by a summary of the historical development of the method (1). The latter part of the article includes a rough structural theory of explication (3) and a detailed presentation of an examplary explication taken from the history of philosophy and the foundations of mathematics (4).

Analysis has always been at the heart of philosophical method, but it has been understood and practised in many different ways. Perhaps, in its broadest sense, it might be defined as a process of isolating or working back to what is more fundamental by means of which something, initially taken as given, can be explained or reconstructed. The explanation or reconstruction is often then exhibited in a corresponding process of synthesis. This allows great variation in specific method, however. The aim (...) may be to get back to basics, but there may be all sorts of ways of doing this, each of which might be called ‘analysis’. The dominance of ‘analytic’ philosophy in the Englishspeaking world, and increasingly now in the rest of the world, might suggest that a consensus has formed concerning the role and importance of analysis. This assumes, though, that there is agreement on what ‘analysis’ means, and this is far from clear. On the other hand, Wittgenstein's later critique of analysis in the early (logical atomist) period of analytic philosophy, and Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction, for example, have led some to claim that we are now in a ‘post-analytic’ age. Such criticisms, however, are only directed at particular conceptions of analysis. If we look at the history of philosophy, and even if we just look at the history of analytic philosophy, we find a rich and extensive repertoire of conceptions of analysis which philosophers have continually drawn upon and reconfigured in different ways. Analytic philosophy is alive and well precisely because of the range of conceptions of analysis that it involves. It may have fragmented into various interlocking subtraditions, but those subtraditions are held together by both their shared history and their methodological interconnections. It is the aim of this article to indicate something of.. (shrink)

Erkenntnis und Irrtum. Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung. Von E. MACH Emer. Professor an der Unlversltlt Wlen. LEIPZIG Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth 1905. INTRODUCTION XIII On a number of occasions Mach expressed the sentiment, especially in his correspondence, that America was the land of intellectual freedom and opportunity, the coming frontier for a new radical empiricism that would help to wash metaphysics out of philosophy. In 1901 he sponsored the German edition of Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1881) (...) 2 by J. B. Stallo, Cincinnati lawyer and philosopher. Mach warmly endorsed Stallo's book because his scientific aims so closely approximated his own, and because Stallo rejected the latent metaphysical elements and concealed ontological assumptions of the mechanical-atomistic inter­ pretation of the world. The second edition of Wiirmelehre was dedicated to Stallo in 1900. The fourth edition of Populiir-wissenschaftliche Vorlesungen (1910), containing seven new essays, was dedicated to Harvard Professor of physiology, philosophY, and psychology, William James. Mach had a strong intellectual affinity for James' pragmatism because, like himself, he recognized that James had come to radically empirical views from science. Both men took pure pre-conceptualized experience, from which the mental and physical predicates of experience are composed, to be neutral rather than real, unreal, objective or subjective. (shrink)

In a recent essay Jürgen Ludwig Scherb strives for a benevolent reconsideration of Heidegger's famous phrase 'the nothing noths' (,das Nichts nichtet'). In 1932 Rudolf Carnap attacked this expression for being meaningless and a pseudo-sentence. Using Stanislaw Lesniewski's ontology. Scherb reconstructs 'the nothing noths' in the tradition of Desmond Paul Henry. My text tries to show that attempts to rehabilitate Heidegger's dictum by just providing such a reconstruction must fail. Indeed, all that Scherb's and Henry's results illustrate is the trivial (...) fact that for every concatenation of signs there is a reconstruction that renders it syntactically well formed and provable. If Scherb wants his reconstruction to stand out among all the other possible reconstructions, it will be necessary for him to scrutinize more than the three words 'the nothing noths'. To facilitate an adequate critique, my text includes an informal introduction to the talk about reconstructions and offers further reconstructions which provide material for illustration and comparison. (shrink)

ANMERKUNGEN ZU KARL JASPERS »PSYCHOLOGIE DER WELTANSCHAUUNGEN« Das eingangs kundzugebende Zugeständnis, daß eine »angemessene« Richtung für eine positiv auf ...

This book is a study in the logic of questions (sometimes called erotetic logic). The central topics in erotetic logic have been the structure of questions and the question-answer relationship. This book doesn't neglect these problems, but much of it is focussed on other issues. The main subject is the logical analysis of certain relations between questions and the contexts of their appearance. And our aim is to elaborate the conceptual apparatus of the inferential approach to the logic of questions. (...) Questions are asked for many reasons and for different purposes. Yet, before a question is asked or posed, a questioner must arrive at it. In many cases arriving at a question resembles coming to a conclusion: there are some premises involved and some inferential thought processes take place. If we agree that a conclusion need not be "conclusive", we may say that sometimes questions can play the role of conclusions. But questions can also perform the role of premises: we often pass from some "initial" question to another question. In other words, there are inferential thought processes - we shall call them erotetic inferences - in which questions play the roles of conclusions or conclusions and premises. The inferential approach to the logic of questions focusses its attention on the analysis of erotetic inferences. This book consists of eight chapters. (shrink)

Frege's philosophy of language includes detailed views on judgments. His formal logic - the Begriffsschrift - documents some of these views in the introduction and treatment of the judgment stroke. In current logic such an expression is either entirely ignored or, appearing as turnstile, plays an fundamentally different role. In this paper I put forward four claims: (i) Considering Frege's Begriffsschrift, it is methodologically palpable why the judgment stroke was omitted in nearly all logical systems developed after Frege. (ii) The (...) Frege-style inclusion of the judgment stroke in a formal language represents a partial implementation of results from speech act theory. (iii) A more comprehensive implementation, not limited to the judgment stroke, helps to satisfy justified expectations about formal languages and logical calculi. (iv) Such an implementation has not yet been achieved in the current logical mainstream. (shrink)