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)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

ACT, CONTENT, AND OBJECT THE TITLE I have chosen for this work is a mere label for a set of problems; the controversial views that have historically been ...

Originally published in 1942, this book was written in attempt to resolve disagreements surrounding educational theory through clarifying the positions of key schools of thought. The text is based around the examination of three typical theories: 'Education According to Nature'; 'The Educational Theory of Johann Friedrich Herbart'; and 'The Educational Theory of John Dewey'. Discussions of the foundations of educational theories and the logical assumptions involved in educational measurement are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with (...) an interest in educational theory and the history of education. (shrink)

How do we know what we "know"? How did we –as individuals and as a society – come to accept certain knowledge as fact? In _Human Knowledge,_ Bertrand Russell questions the reliability of our assumptions on knowledge. This brilliant and controversial work investigates the relationship between ‘individual’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge. First published in 1948, this provocative work contributed significantly to an explosive intellectual discourse that continues to this day.

Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

Ambiguity, vagueness and metaphor are pervasive features of language, deserving of systematic study in their own right. Yet they have frequently been considered mere deviations from ideal language or obstacles to be avoided in the construction of scientific systems. First published in 1979, Beyond the Letter offers a consecutive study of these features from a philosphical point of view, providing analyses of each and treating their relations to one another. Addressed to the fundamental task of logical and semantic explanation, the (...) book employs an inscriptional methodology in the attempt to avoid prevalent forms of question-begging, and, further, in the conviction that sparseness of assumption often reveals points of theoretical interest irrespective of methodolgical preference. The author distinguishes and analyses several varieties of ambiguity, developing new semantic notions in the process; recasts the philosophical treatment of vagueness in the light of recent criticisms of analyticity; discusses the bearing of vagueness on logic; and provides a systematic critique of major recent interpretations of metaphor, developing a revised version of contextualism. (shrink)

When our oldest daughter, Sarah, was four years old the family kitten, Fluffy, contracted fleas. There ensued a primitive ritual of flea extermination that touched off the following discussion:Sarah: ‘Daddy, how did Fluffy get fleas?’Me: ‘Oh, I suspect she was playing with a cat that already had fleas. The fleas on that cat jumped off on to Fluffy.’Sarah : ‘And how did that cat get fleas?’Me : ‘Oh, probably from another cat.’Sarah : ‘But, Daddy, it can't go on and on (...) like that forever. The only thing that goes on and on like that forever is numbers.’. (shrink)

“There ceases to be any reason to count awareness as an essential trait of observation.”-from “Stimulus and Meaning”As W. V. Quine sees it we must, in the interests of science, resist “the old tendency to associate observation sentences with a subjective sensory subject matter,” because such sentences are “meant to be the intersubjective tribunal of scientific hypotheses“; observation sentences are meant to be the independent and objective control of scientific theory. Accordingly, Quine has developed a behaviouristic operational definition of an (...) observation sentence for the purpose of dispelling the air of subjectivity which surrounds the notion of observation.In this paper I argue that his observation-sentence definition, or criterion, fails to fulfil this purpose. In the first half of the paper, I describe in particular the kind of subjectivism which most worries Quine-what he calls the epistemological nihilism of Hanson, Kuhn and Polanyi-and I then turn to Quine's remedy, his observation criterion. (shrink)

“There ceases to be any reason to count awareness as an essential trait of observation.”-from “Stimulus and Meaning”As W. V. Quine sees it we must, in the interests of science, resist “the old tendency to associate observation sentences with a subjective sensory subject matter,” because such sentences are “meant to be the intersubjective tribunal of scientific hypotheses“; observation sentences are meant to be the independent and objective control of scientific theory. Accordingly, Quine has developed a behaviouristic operational definition of an (...) observation sentence for the purpose of dispelling the air of subjectivity which surrounds the notion of observation.In this paper I argue that his observation-sentence definition, or criterion, fails to fulfil this purpose. In the first half of the paper, I describe in particular the kind of subjectivism which most worries Quine-what he calls the epistemological nihilism of Hanson, Kuhn and Polanyi-and I then turn to Quine's remedy, his observation criterion. (shrink)