Online research in philosophy

My focus here will be Rudolf Carnap’s views on ontology, as these are presented in the seminal “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (1950). I will first describe how I think Carnap’s distinction between external and internal questions is best understood. Then I will turn to broader issues regarding Carnap’s views on ontology. With certain reservations, I will ascribe to Carnap an ontological pluralist position roughly similar to the positions of Eli Hirsch and the later Hilary Putnam. Then I turn to some interrelated arguments against the pluralist view. The arguments are not demonstrative. Some possible escape routes for the pluralist are outlined. But I think the arguments constitute a formidable challenge. There should be serious doubt as to whether the pluralist view, as it emerges after discussion of these arguments, will be worth defending. Moreover, there is an alternative ontological view which equally well subserves the motivations underlying ontological pluralism.

This essay aims at proposing a “philosophically important” form of scientific pluralism that captures essential features of contemporary scientific pratice largely ignored by the various forms of scientific pluralism currently discussed by philosophers. My starting point is Hacking’s concept of style of scentific reasoning, with a focus on its ontological import. I extend Hacking’s thesis by proposing the process of “ontological enrichment” to grasp how the objects created by a style articulate with the common objects of scientific inquiry “out there in the world”. The result is “foliated pluralism”, which puts to the fore the transdisciplinary and cumulative ways of proceeding in science, as well as the historical dimension of the genesis of scientific objects.

Ontological Pluralism is the view that there are different modes, ways, or kinds of being. In this paper, I characterize the view more fully (drawing on some recent work by Kris McDaniel) and then defend the view against a number of arguments. (All of the arguments I can think of against it, anyway.).

This paper is a sort of postscript to Ontological Pluralism. I here consider the charge that Pluralism is a mere notational variant of Ontological Monism (which says there is only one kind of being), and argue that, given certain realist assumptions about logic, this charge can’t be right.