Online research in philosophy

Abstract Some philosophers find linguistic meaning mysterious. Two approaches suggest themselves for removing the felt mystery, or demystifying meaning. One involves providing a substantive account of meaning in meaning-free terms. Although this approach has come under serious attack in recent years, Paul Horwich has recently presented a version of the approach that might be thought impervious. A preliminary attempt is made to argue that Horwich's version is vulnerable to the considerations felt to undermine other versions of the substantive approach to demystification. That leaves the second approach, quietism, which involves showing that although meaning is primitive it is un-mysterious. It is suggested that this approach is worthy of exploration.

A holistic account of the meaning of theoretical terms leads scientific realism into serious troubles. Alternative methods of reference fixing are needed by a realist who wishes to show how reference invariance is possible in spite of meaning variance. This paper argues that the similarity theory of truthlikeness and approximate truth, developed by logicians since the mid 1970s, helps to make precise the idea of charitable theoretical reference. Comparisons to the recent proposals by Kitcher and Psillos are given. This argument helps to undermine the scepticist meta-induction about theories, and thereby to reevaluate Laudan's alleged confutation of scientific realism.

I propose a new approach to the constitutive problem of psychology ‘what is mind?’ The first section introduces modifications of the received scope, methodology, and evaluation criteria of unified theories of cognition in accordance with the requirements of evolutionary compatibility and of a mature science. The second section outlines the proposed theory. Its first part provides empirically verifiable conditions delineating the class of meaningful neural formations and modifies accordingly the traditional conceptions of meaning, concept and thinking. This analysis is part of a theory of communication in terms of inter-level systems of primitives that proposes the communication-understanding principle as a psychological invariance. It unifies a substantial amount of research by systematizing the notions of meaning, thinking, concept, belief, communication, and understanding and leads to a minimum vocabulary for this core system of mental phenomena. Its second part argues that written human language is the key characteristic of the artificially natural human mind. Overall, the theory both supports Darwin’s continuity hypothesis and proposes that the mental gap is within our own species.

David Albert's Time and Chance (2000) provides a fresh and interesting perspective on the problem of the direction of time. Unfortunately, the book opens with a highly non-standard exposition of time reversal invariance that distorts the subsequent discussion. The present article not only has the remedial goal of setting the record straight about the meaning of time reversal invariance, but it also aims to show how the niceties of this symmetry concept matter to the problem of the direction of time and to related foundation issues in physics.

I present a notion of invariance under arbitrary surjective mappings for operators on a relational finite type hierarchy generalizing the so-called Tarski–Sher criterion for logicality and I characterize the invariant operators as definable in a fragment of the first-order language. These results are compared with those obtained by Feferman and it is argued that further clarification of the notion of invariance is needed if one wants to use it to characterize logicality.

In traditional semantic theory the meaning of a word or operator (logical constant) is permeated with normativity. It is held that if one grasps the meaning of a word (or logical constant), one ought to behave in a certain way. This view is labelled as normativism here. Normativists hold that meaning is intrinsically and irreducibly normative. The naturalistic approach to semantics, on the other hand, which tries to reconcile the traditional approach to meaning with a naturalistic world-view, has to naturalise the normative character ofmeaning. Naturalists employ several strategies of argumentation, two of which I deem to be particularly significant. These two strategies are exemplified by P. Horwich’s revisionistic and C. Peacocke’s reductionistic approaches. This paper elucidates and critiques the former. My criticism tries to show that Horwich’s theory does not offer a successful answer to the normativist challenge.

Most philosophers of science nowadays hold a network or postulational view of the meaning of theoretical words. However, there are many nuances to this view, and after explicitly separating them, we show what we take to be wrong with each one. While we reject the postulational view we do not defend its traditional alternatives either; rather we show the pointlessness of insisting on a single source for the meaning of theoretical words. We also point out the shortcomings of Carnap's newest meaning criterion which depends upon a network view. But, again, we suggest not only that this new rendition of the criterion is faulty but also that there is something misguided about any search at all for such a criterion.

In this article I discuss the justification of scientific change and argue that it rests on different sorts of invariance. Against this background I consider notions of observation, meaning, and regulative standards. I sketch an account of the rationale of scientific change which preserves the merits and avoids the shortcomings of the approach of Feyerabend, Hanson, Kuhn, Toulmin, and others. Each of these writers would hold that transitions from one scientific tradition to another force radical changes in what is observed, in the meanings of the terms employed, and in the metastandards involved. They would claim that "incommensurable" replacement is what does, and should, occur during scientific "revolutions." Such writers, however, have trouble in comparing different scientific theories. My account permits different theories to be compared in various ways. These comparisons, I argue, are possible through appeal to "first-level" and "second-level" invariance. In this connection I argue that observation, meaning, and regulative standards should be, and in fact usually are, nontrivially invariant with respect to scientific change.

N. Cartwright's recent results on invariance under intervention and causality (2003) are reconsidered. Procedural approach to causality elicited in this paper and contrasted with Cartwright's apparently philosophical one unravels certain ramifications of her results. The procedural approach seems to license only a constrained notion of intervention and in consequence the "correctness to invariance" part of Cartwright's first theorem fails for a class of cases. The converse "invariance to correctness" part of the theorem relies heavily on modeling assumptions which prove to be difficult to validate in practice and are often buttressed by independently acquired evidence.

The rationality of scientific concept formation in theory transitions, challenged by the thesis of semantic incommensurability, can be restored by theChains of Meaning approach to concept formation. According to this approach, concepts of different, succeeding theories may be identified with respect to referential meaning, in spite of grave diversity of the mathematical structures characterizing them in their respective theories. The criterion of referential identity for concepts is that they meet a relation ofsemantic embedding, i.e. that the embedding concept can be substituted by the embedded one in classical limit situations. Three case studies from contemporary physics theories will be used to show that the Chains of Meaning approach not only yields meaning comparisons for already established concepts (as for Newtonian and Schwarzschild mass) but is also well suited to characterize actual scientific strategies of concept formation in yet open cases such as black hole entropy or relativistic thermodynamics.