Both realists and instrumentalists have found it difficult to understand (much less accept) Carnap’s developed view on theoretical terms, which attempts to stake out a neutral position between realism and instrumentalism. I argue that Carnap’s mature conception of a scientific theory as the conjunction of its Ramsey sentence and Carnap sentence can indeed achieve this neutral position. To see this, however, we need to see why the Newman problem raised in the context of recent work on structural realism is no (...) problem for Carnap’s conception; and we also need to locate Carnap’s work on theoretical terms within his wider program of Wissenschaftslogik or the logic of science. (shrink)
Michael Friedman's book develops a new and complete reading of this work and reconstructs Kant's main argument clearly and in great detail, explaining its relationship to both Newton's Principia and eighteenth-century scientific thinkers ...
I use recent work on Kant and diagrammatic reasoning to develop a reconsideration of central aspects of Kant’s philosophy of geometry and its relation to spatial intuition. In particular, I reconsider in this light the relations between geometrical concepts and their schemata, and the relationship between pure and empirical intuition. I argue that diagrammatic interpretations of Kant’s theory of geometrical intuition can, at best, capture only part of what Kant’s conception involves and that, for example, they cannot explain why Kant (...) takes geometrical constructions in the style of Euclid to provide us with an a priori framework for physical space. I attempt, along the way, to shed new light on the relationship between Kant’s theory of space and the debate between Newton and Leibniz to which he was reacting, and also on the role of geometry and spatial intuition in the transcendental deduction of the categories. (shrink)
Immanuel Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) provides metaphysical foundations for the application of mathematics to empirically given nature. The application that Kant primarily has in mind is that achieved in Isaac Newton's Principia (1687). Thus, Kant's first chapter, the Phoronomy, concerns the mathematization of speed or velocity, and his fourth chapter, the Phenomenology, concerns the empirical application of the Newtonian notions of true or absolute space, time, and motion. This paper concentrates on Kant's second and third chapters—the Dynamics (...) and the Mechanics, respectively—and argues that they are best read as providing a transcendental explanation of the conditions for the possibility of applying the (mathematical) concept of quantity of matter to experience. Kant again has in mind the empirical measures of this quantity that Newton fashions in the Principia, and he aims to make clear, in particular, how Newton achieves a universal measure for all bodies whatsoever by projecting the static quantity of terrestrial weight into the heavens by means of the theory of universal gravitation. Kant is not attempting to prove a priori what Newton has established empirically but, rather, to clarify the character of Newton's mathematization by building Newton's empirical measures into the very concept of matter that is articulated in the Metaphysical Foundations. (shrink)
What I call the dynamics of reason is a post-Kuhnian approach to the history and philosophy of science articulating a relativized and historicized version of the Kantian conception of the rationality and objectivity of the modern physical sciences. I here discuss two extensions of this approach. I argue that, although the relativized standards of rationality in question change over time, the particular way in which they do this still preserves the trans-historical rationality of the entire process. I also make a (...) beginning in extending my historical narrative from purely intellectual history (both philosophical and scientific) to the wider cultural context. (shrink)
This paper raises some minor questions about Lisa Tessman’s book, Burdened Virtues. Friedman’s questions pertain, among other things, to the adequacy of a virtue ethical focus on character, the apparent implication of virtue ethics that oppressors suffer damaged characters and are not any better off than the oppressed, the importance of whether privileged persons may have earned their privileges, and the oppositional anger that movement feminists sometimes direct against each other.
Carl Hempel introduced what he called "Craig's theorem" into the philosophy of science in a famous discussion of the "problem of theoretical terms." Beginning with Hempel's use of 'Craig's theorem," I shall bring out some of the key differences between Hempel's treatment of the "problem of theoretical terms" and Carnap's in order to illuminate the peculiar function of Wissenschaftslogik in Carnap's mature philosophy. Carnap's treatment, in particular, is fundamentally antimetaphysical—he aims to use the tools of mathematical logic to dissolve rather (...) solve traditional philosophical problems—and it is precisely this point that is missed by his logically-minded contemporaries such as Hempel and Quine. (shrink)
Should women’s terrorist acts be understood differently than similar acts carried out by men? Does the gender identity of a terrorist make a difference to the meaning of a terrorist’s acts? Commentators who explain women’s involvement in terrorism often offer explanations other than political commitment. They often refer instead to factors in the women’s personal relationships, thereby drawing on gender stereotypes and diminishing the women’s political commitments. I suggest instead that terrorism by a woman involves symbolic political “testimony.” It amounts (...) to saying that someone who is a typically nonviolent sort of person has engaged in violence on behalf of a political cause. Because of this significance, women’s terrorism merits a more serious consideration as testimony than similar acts by men. (shrink)
: Nancy J. Hirschmann presents a feminist, social constructionist account of women's freedom. Friedman's discussion of Hirschmann's account deals with (1) some conceptual problems facing a thoroughgoing social constructionism; (2) three ways to modify social constructionism to avoid those problems; and (3) an assessment of Hirschmann's version of social constructionism in light of the previous discussion.
Skeptical problems arising for Kant's version of transcendental idealism have been raised from Kant's own time to the present day. By focussing on how such problems originally arose in the wake of Kant's work, and on the first formulations of absolute idealism by Schelling, I argue that the skeptical problems in question ultimately depend on fundamental features of Kant's philosophy of natural science. As a result, Naturphilosophie and the organic conception of nature cannot easily be separated from the deep and (...) insightful response to these problems offered by absolute idealism. (shrink)
The notion of citizenship is complex; it can be at once an identity; a set of rights, privileges, and responsibilities; an elevated and exclusionary status, a relationship between individual and state, and more. In recent decades citizenship has attracted interdisciplinary attention, particularly with the transnational growth of Western capitalism. Yet citizenship's relationship to gender has gone relatively unexplored--despite that throughout much of human history, women have been and continue to be denied citizenship, sometimes at even the lowest rank. This highly (...) interdisciplinary volume explores the political and cultural dimensions of citizenship and their relevance to women and gender. Containing essays by a well-known group of scholars, including Iris Marion Young, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nussbaum, and Sandra Bartky, this book examines the conceptual issues and strategies at play in the feminist quest to give women full citizenship status. The contributors take a fresh look at the issues, going beyond conventional critiques, and examine problems in the political and social arrangements, practices, and conditions that diminish women's citizenship in various parts of the world, including both Western and undeveloped nations. (shrink)
This paper explores the relationship between Kant's views on the metaphysical foundations of Newtonian mathematical physics and his more general transcendental philosophy articulated in the Critique of pure reason. I argue that the relationship between the two positions is very close indeed and, in particular, that taking this relationship seriously can shed new light on the structure of the transcendental deduction of the categories as expounded in the second edition of the Critique.
Women have historically been prevented from living autonomously by systematic injustice, subordination, and oppression. The lingering effects of these practices have prompted many feminists to view autonomy with suspicion. Here, Marilyn Friedman defends the ideal of feminist autonomy. In her eyes, behavior is autonomous if it accords with the wants, cares, values, or commitments that the actor has reaffirmed and is able to sustain in the face of opposition. By her account, autonomy is socially grounded yet also individualizing and sometimes (...) socially disruptive, qualities that can be ultimately advantageous for women. Friedman applies the concept of autonomy to domains of special interest to women. She defends the importance of autonomy in romantic love, considers how social institutions should respond to women who choose to remain in abusive relationships, and argues that liberal societies should tolerate minority cultural practices that violate women's rights so long as the women in question have chosen autonomously to live according to those practices. (shrink)
Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue , the first study in any language to provide a complete overview of Buber's thought, remains the definitive guide to the full range of his work and the starting point for all modern Buber scholarship. As well as summarizing Buber's early intellectual development and attitudes - his mysticism, his youthful existentialism, his philosophy of Judaism and religious socialism - it focuses on the two crucial issues of his mature thought: his dialogic or I-Thou philosophy, (...) and his probing of the nature and redemption of evil. As a sensitive, intuitive and perennially fascinating account of one of the twentieth century's great spiritual teachers, and as an influential classic in its own right, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue reveals the implications of Buber's thought for theory of knowledge, education, philosophy, myth, history and Judaic and Christian belief. This fully revised and expanded 4th edition includes a new preface from the author, an expanded bibliography incorporating new Buber scholarship, and two new appendices in the form of essays on Buber's influence on Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin. (shrink)
This paper considers the evolution of the problem of scientific rationality from Kant through Carnap to Kuhn. I argue for a relativized and historicized version of the original Kantian conception of scientific a priori principles and examine the way in which these principles change and develop across revolutionary paradigm shifts. The distinctively philosophical enterprise of reflecting upon and contextualizing such principles is then seen to play a key role in making possible rational intersubjective communication between otherwise incommensurable paradigms.
This book introduces a new approach to the issue of radical scientific revolutions, or "paradigm-shifts," given prominence in the work of Thomas Kuhn. The book articulates a dynamical and historicized version of the conception of scientific a priori principles first developed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. This approach defends the Enlightenment ideal of scientific objectivity and universality while simultaneously doing justice to the revolutionary changes within the sciences that have since undermined Kant's original defense of this ideal. Through a modified (...) Kantian approach to epistemology and philosophy of science, this book opposes both Quinean naturalistic holism and the post-Kuhnian conceptual relativism that has dominated recent literature in science studies. Focussing on the development of "scientific philosophy" from Kant to Rudolf Carnap, along with the parallel developments taking place in the sciences during the same period, the author articulates a new dynamical conception of relativized a priori principles. This idea applied within the physical sciences aims to show that rational intersubjective consensus is intricately preserved across radical scientific revolutions or "paradigm-shifts and how this is achieved. (shrink)
In this collection of essays one of the preeminent philosophers of science writing today offers a reinterpretation of the enduring significance of logical positivism, the revolutionary philosophical movement centered around the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and '30s. Michael Friedman argues that the logical positivists were radicals not by presenting a new version of empiricism (as is often thought to be the case) but rather by offering a new conception of a priori knowledge and its role in empirical knowledge. This (...) collection will be mandatory reading for any philosopher or historian of science interested in the history of logical positivism in particular or the evolution of modern philosophy in general. (shrink)
[Michael Friedman] This paper considers the extent to which Kant's vision of a distinctively 'transcendental' task for philosophy is essentially tied to his views on the foundations of the mathematical and physical sciences. Contemporary philosophers with broadly Kantian sympathies have attempted to reinterpret his project so as to isolate a more general philosophical core not so closely tied to the details of now outmoded mathematical-physical theories (Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics). I consider two such attempts, those of Strawson and McDowell, (...) and argue that they fundamentally distort the original Kantian impulse. I then consider Buchdahl's attempt to preserve the link between Kantian philosophy and the sciences while simultaneously generalizing Kant's doctrines in light of later scientific developments. I argue that Buchdahl's view, while not adequate as in interpretation of Kant in his own eighteenth century context, is nonetheless suggestive of an historicized and relativized revision of Kantianism that can do justice to both Kant's original philosophical impulse and the radical changes in the sciences that have occurred since Kant's day. /// [Graham Bird] Michael Friedman criticises some recent accounts of Kant which 'detach' his transcendental principles from the sciences, and do so in order to evade naturalism. I argue that Friedman's rejection of that 'detachment' is ambiguous. In its strong form, which I claim Kant rejects, the principles of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics are represented as transcendental principles. In its weak form, which I believe Kant accepts, it treats those latter principles as higher order conditions of the possibility of both science and ordinary experience. I argue also that the appeal to naturalism is unhelpful because that doctrine is seriously unclear, and because the accounts Friedman criticises are open to objections independent of any appeal to naturalism. (shrink)
In this article we evaluate the BankXX program from several perspectives. BankXX is a case-based legal argument program that retrieves cases and other legal knowledge pertinent to a legal argument through a combination of heuristic search and knowledge-based indexing. The program is described in detail in a companion article in Artificial Intelligence and Law 4: 1--71, 1996. Three perspectives are used to evaluate BankXX:(1) classical information retrieval measures of precision and recall applied against a hand-coded baseline; (2) knowledge-representation and case-based (...) reasoning, where the baseline is provided by the functionality of a well-known case-based argument program, HYPO (Ashley, 1990); and (3) search, in which the performance of BankXX run with various parameter settings, for instance, resource limits, is compared. In this article we report on an extensive series of experiments performed to evaluate the program. We also describe two additional experiments concerning(1) the program's search behavior; and (2) the use of a modified form of precision and recall based on case similarity. Finally we offer some general conclusions that might be drawn from these particular experiments. (shrink)
Autonomy has risen in esteem, then fallen, only to rise again in recent theorizing about women in society and culture. In this paper, I further bolster the renewed feminist interest in autonomy. I characterize feminist social aspirations in terms of three very abstract goals and then argue that women’s individual autonomy promotes at least two of them in crucial ways. Women’s autonomy will improve the quality of the close personal relationships that pervade women’s traditional moral concems (the first goal) and (...) it will enable women the better to resist traditional, gender-based constraints on their lives (the second goal). My conclusion is tempered, however, by the view that individual autonomy interferes to a significant degree with the solidarity and collective action by women needed to effect feminist social change (the third goal) . In passing, I gesture toward a conception of autonomy as a certain kind of narrative of self-development. (shrink)
The BankXX system models the process of perusing and gathering information for argument as a heuristic best-first search for relevant cases, theories, and other domain-specific information. As BankXX searches its heterogeneous and highly interconnected network of domain knowledge, information is incrementally analyzed and amalgamated into a dozen desirable ingredients for argument (called argument pieces), such as citations to cases, applications of legal theories, and references to prototypical factual scenarios. At the conclusion of the search, BankXX outputs the set of argument (...) pieces filled with harvested material relevant to the input problem situation.This research explores the appropriateness of the search paradigm as a framework for harvesting and mining information needed to make legal arguments. In this article, we describe how legal research fits the heuristic search framework and detail how this model is used in BankXX. We describe the BankXX program with emphasis on its representation of legal knowledge and legal argument. We describe the heuristic search mechanism and evaluation functions that drive the program. We give an extended example of the processing of BankXX on the facts of an actual legal case in BankXX's application domain — the good faith question of Chapter 13 personal bankruptcy law. We discuss closely related research on legal knowledge representation and retrieval and the use of search for case retrieval or tasks related to argument creation. Finally we review what we believe are the contributions of this research to the understanding of the diverse disciplines it addresses. (shrink)
Feminist ethics supports the contemporary educational trend toward increased multiculturalism and a diminished emphasis on the Western canon. First, I outline a feminist ethical justification for this development. Second, I argue that Western canon studies should not be altogether abandoned in a multicultural curriculum. Third, I suggest that multicultural education should help combat oppression in addition to simply promoting awareness of diversity. Fourth, I caution against an arrogant moralism in the teaching of multiculturalism.
The logical positivists adopted Poincare's doctrine of the conventionality of geometry and made it a key part of their philosophical interpretation of relativity theory. I argue, however, that the positivists deeply misunderstood Poincare's doctrine. For Poincare's own conception was based on the group-theoretical picture of geometry expressed in the Helmholtz-Lie solution of the space problem, and also on a hierarchical picture of the sciences according to which geometry must be presupposed be any properly physical theory. But both of this pictures (...) are entirely incompatible with the radically new conception of space and geometry articulated in the general theory of relativity. The logical positivists's attempt to combine Poincare's conventionalism with Einstein's new theory was therefore, in the end, simply incoherent. Underlying this problem, moreover, was a fundamental philosophical difference between Poincare's and the positivists concerning the status of synthetic a priori truths. (shrink)
In this new book, Michael Friedman argues that Kant's continuing efforts to find a metaphysics that could provide a foundation for the sciences is of the utmost ...
This review of Janice Raymond's A Passion for Friends focuses on her strong sense of the individual and of individuality. However, and this is the central contention of my paper, her perspective is quite distinct from liberal individualism. It is also a complex variation on the feminist concern with selves in relationships.
Recent welfare cuts have revealed that the patriarchal control of women's domestic labor has been significantly relocated from the home and the governmental bureaucracy to the marketplace. Through the sale of domestic and reproductive labor, many low income women have come to occupy a class position in relation to middle and upper income families which parallels the position occupied by the traditional wife in relation to her husband.
