In this article, against the background of a notion of ‘assembled’ truth, the evolutionary progressiveness of a theory is suggested as novel and promising explanation for the success of science. A new version of realism in science, referred to as ‘naturalised realism’ is outlined. Naturalised realism is ‘fallibilist’ in the unique sense that it captures and mimics the self-corrective core of scientific knowledge and its progress. It is argued that naturalised realism disarms Kyle Stanford’s anti-realist ‘new induction’ threats by showing (...) that ‘explanationism’ and his ‘epistemic instrumentalism’ are just two positions among many on a constantly evolving continuum of options between instrumentalism and full-blown realism. In particular it is demonstrated that not only can naturalised realism redefine the terms of realist debate in such a way that no talk of miracles need enter the debate, but it also promises interesting defenses against inductive- and under-determination-based anti-realist arguments. (shrink)

This Introduction has two foci: the first is a discussion of the motivation for and the aims of the 2014 conference on New Thinking about Scientific Realism in Cape Town South Africa, and the second is a brief contextualization of the contributed articles in this special issue of Synthese in the framework of the conference. Each focus is discussed in a separate section.

In this paper, by suggesting a formal representation of science based on recent advances in logic-based Artificial Intelligence (AI), we show how three serious concerns around the realisation of traditional scientific realism (the theory/observation distinction, over-determination of theories by data, and theory revision) can be overcome such that traditional realism is given a new guise as ‘naturalised’. We contend that such issues can be dealt with (in the context of scientific realism) by developing a formal representation of science based on (...) the application of the following tools from Knowledge Representation: the family of Description Logics, an enrichment of classical logics via defeasible statements, and an application of the preferential interpretation of the approach to Belief Revision. (shrink)

Naturalised realism’ is presented as a version of realism which is more compatible with the history of science than convergent or explanationist forms of realism. The account is unpacked according to four theses: 1) Whether realism is warranted with regards to a particular theory depends on the kind and quality of evidence available for that theory; 2) Reference is about causal interaction with the world; 3) Most of science happens somewhere in between instrumentalism and scientific realism on a continuum of (...) stances towards the status of theories; 4) The degree to which realism is warranted has something to do with the degree to which theories successfully refer, rather than with the truth of theories. (shrink)

In this book Emma Ruttkamp demonstrates the power of the full-blown employment of the model-theoretic paradigm in the philosophy of science. Within this paradigm she gives an account of sciences as process and product. She expounds the "received statement" and the "non-statement" views of science, and shows how the model-theoretic approach resolves the spurious tension between these views. In this endeavour she also engages the views of a number of contemporary philosophers of science with affinity to model theory. (...) This text can be read by specialists working in philosophy of science or formal semantics, by logicians working on the structure of theories, and by students in philosophy of science - this text offers a thorough introduction to non-statement accounts of sciences as well as a discussion of the traditional statement account of science. (shrink)

My model-theoretic realist account of science places linguistic systems and the corresponding non-linguistic structures at different stages of the scientific process. It is shown that science and its progress cannot be analysed in terms of only one of these strata. Philosophy of science literature offers mainly two approaches; to the structure of scientific knowledge analysed in terms of theories and their models, the "statement" and the "non-statement" approaches. In opposition to the statement approach's belief that scientific knowledge is embodied in (...) theories symbolic language) with direct interpretative links---via so-called "bridge principles"---to reality, the defenders of the non-statement approach believe in an analysis where the language in which the theory is formulated plays a much smaller role than the structures which satisfy that theory. ;The model-theoretic realism expounded here retains the notion of a scientific theory as a set of sentences, while simultaneously emphasising the interpretative role of the conceptual models of these theories. My criticism against the non-statement approach is based on the fact that merely "giving" the theory "in terms of" its mathematical structures leaves out any real interpretation of the nature and role of general terms in science. Against the statement approach's "direct" linking of general theoretical terms to reality, my approach interpolates models between theories and reality in the interpretative chain. ;The links between the general terms of scientific theories and their interpretations in the various models of the theory regulate the whole referential process. The terms of a theory are "general" in the sense that they are the result of certain abstractive conceptualisations of the object of scientific investigation and subsequent linguistic formulations of these conceptualisations. Their meanings can be "given back" only by interpreting them in the limited context, of the various conceptual models of their theory and, finally, by finding an isomorphic relation between some substructure of the conceptual model in question and some empirical conceptualisation of relevant experimental data. In this sense the notion of scientific "truth" becomes inextricably linked with that of articulated reference, as it---given its model-dependent nature---should be. (shrink)

In this article, we redefine classical notions of theory reduction in such a way that model-theoretic preferential semantics becomes part of a realist depiction of this aspect of science. We offer a model-theoretic reconstruction of science in which theory succession or reduction is often better - or at a finer level of analysis - interpreted as the result of model succession or reduction. This analysis leads to 'defeasible reduction', defined as follows: The conjunction of the assumptions of a reducing theory (...) T with the definitions translating the vocabulary of a reduced theory T' to the vocabulary of T, defeasibly entails the assumptions of reduced T'. This relation of defeasible reduction offers, in the context of additional knowledge becoming available, articulation of a more flexible kind of reduction in theory development than in the classical case. Also, defeasible reduction is shown to solve the problems of entailment that classical homogeneous reduction encounters. Reduction in the defeasible sense is a practical device for studying the processes of science, since it is about highlighting different aspects of the same theory at different times of application, rather than about naive dreams concerning a metaphysical unity of science. (shrink)

I investigate a new understanding of realism in science, referred to as ‘interactive realism’, and I suggest the ‘evolutionary progressiveness’ of a theory as novel criterion for this kind of realism. My basic claim is that we cannot be realists about anything except the progress affected by myriad science-reality interactions that are constantly moving on a continuum of increased ‘fitness’ determined according to empirical constraints. Moreover to reflect this movement accurately, there is a corresponding continuum of verdicts about the status (...) of the knowledge conveyed by theories – ranging from stark instrumentalism to full-blown realism. This view may sound like a pessimistic inductivist's dream, but actually this is so only if one evaluates it from within a traditional context where the ‘truth’ of a single theory is the exclusive criterion for realism. I, on the other hand, want to redefine the terms of realist debate in such a way that the units of assessment of realism are sequences of theories evaluated according to their ‘evolutionary progressiveness’. I unpack ‘interactive realism’ by defining my notion of ‘evolutionary progressiveness’, the notion of ‘truth-as-historied reference’ underpinning it, and the continuum of interaction between theories and aspects of reality it affects. I conclude that, although interactive realism is a radically non-standard kind of realism, it is at least more realistic about science as a fractured complex multi-faceted enterprise than most other kinds of realism on the block, because it shows coherence amidst fragmentation. (shrink)

This is a first tentative examination of the possibility of reinstating reduction as a valid candidate for presenting relations between mental and physical properties. Classical Nagelian reduction is undoubtedly contaminated in many ways, but here I investigate the possibility of adapting to problems concerning mental properties an alternative definition for theory reduction in philosophy of science. The definition I offer is formulated with the aid of non-monotonic logic, which I suspect might be a very interesting realm for testing notions concerning (...) localized mental-physical reduction. The reason for this is that non-monotonic reasoning by definition is about appeals made not only to explicit observations, but also to an implicit selection of background knowledge containing heuristic information. The flexibility of this definition and the fact that it is not absolute, i.e. that the relation of reduction may be retracted or allowed to shift without fuss, add at least an interesting alternative factor to current materialist debates. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(2) 2006: 102-112. (shrink)

In this article I give an overview of some recent work in philosophy of science dedicated to analysing the scientific process in terms of (conceptual) mathematical models of theories and the various semantic relations between such models, scientific theories, and aspects of reality. In current philosophy of science, the most interesting questions centre around the ways in which writers distinguish between theories and the mathematical structures that interpret them and in which they are true, i.e. between scientific theories as linguistic (...) systems and their non-linguistic models. In philosophy of science literature there are two main approaches to the structure of scientific theories, the statement or syntactic approach -- advocated by Carnap, Hempel and Nagel -- and the non- statement or semantic approach --advocated, among others, by Suppes, the structuralists, Beth, Van Fraassen, Giere, Wojcicki. In conclusion, I briefly review some of the usual realist inspired questions about the possibility and character of relations between scientific theories and reality as implied by the various approaches I discuss in the course of the article. The models of a scientific theory should indeed be adequate to the phenomena, but if the theory is 'adequate' to (true in) its conceptual (mathematical) models as well, we have a model-theoretic realism that addresses the possible meaning and reference of 'theoretical entities' without relapsing into the metaphysics typical of the usual scientific realist approaches. (shrink)

In this inaugural lecture I offer, against the background of a discussion of knowledge representation and its tools, an overview of my research in the philosophy of science. I defend a relational model-theoretic realism as being the appropriate meta-stance most congruent with the model-theoretic view of science as a form of human engagement with the world. Making use of logics with preferential semantics within a model-theoretic paradigm, I give an account of science as process and product. I demonstrate the power (...) of the full-blown employment of this paradigm in the philosophy of science by discussing the main applications of model-theoretic realism to traditional problems in the philosophy of science. I discuss my views of the nature of logic and of its role in the philosophy of science today. I also specifically offer a brief discussion on the future of cognitive philosophy in South Africa. My conclusion is a general look at the nature of philosophical inquiry and its significance for philosophers today. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25 (4) 2006: pp. 275-289. (shrink)

A model-theoretic realist account of science places linguistic systems and their corresponding non-linguistic structures at different stages or different levels of abstraction of the scientific process. Apart from the obvious problem of underdetermination of theories by data, philosophers of science are also faced with the inverse (and very real) problem of overdetermination of theories by their empirical models, which is what this article will focus on. I acknowledge the contingency of the factors determining the nature – and choice – of (...) a certain model at a certain time, but in my terms, this is a matter about which we can talk and whose structure we can formalise. In this article a mechanism for tracing "empirical choices" and their particularized observational-theoretical entanglements will be offered in the form of Yoav Shoham's version of non-monotonic logic. Such an analysis of the structure of scientific theories may clarify the motivations underlying choices in favor of certain empirical models (and not others) in a way that shows that "disentangling" theoretical and observation terms is more deeply model-specific than theory-specific. This kind of analysis offers a method for getting an articulable grip on the overdetermination of theories by their models – implied by empirical equivalence – which Kuipers' structuralist analysis of the structure of theories does not offer. (shrink)

If the defenders of typical postmodern accounts of science (and their less extreme social-constructivist partners) are at one end of the scale in current philosophy of science, who shall we place at the other end? Old-style metaphysical realists? Neo-neo-positivists? ... Are the choices concerning realist issues as simple as being centered around either, on the one hand, whether it is the way reality is “constructed” in accordance with some contingent language game that determines scientific “truth”; or, on the other hand, (...) whether it is the way things are in an independent reality that makes our theories true or false? If, in terms of realism, “strong” implies “metaphysical” in the traditional sense, and “weak” implies “non-absolutist” or “non-unique”, what – if anything – could realism after Rorty's shattering of the mirror of nature still entail? In accordance with my position as a model-theoretic realist, I shall show in this article the relevance of the assumption of an independent reality for postmodern (philosophy of) science – against Lyotard's dismissal of the necessity of this assumption for science which he interprets as a non-privileged game among many others. I shall imply that science is neither the “child” of positivist philosophy who has outgrown her mother, freeing herself from metaphysics and epistemology, nor is science, at the other end of the scale, foundationless and up for grabs. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(3) 2003: 220–235. (shrink)

One way in which to address the intriguing relations between science and reality is to work via the models (mathematical structures) of formal scientific theories which are interpretations under which these theories turn out to be true. The so-called 'statement approach' to scientific theories -- characteristic for instance of Nagel, Carnap, and Hempel --depicts theories in terms of 'symbolic languages' and some set of 'correspondence rules' or 'definition principles'. The defenders of the oppositionist non-statement approach advocate an analysis where the (...) language in which the theory is formulated plays a much smaller role. They hold that foundational problems in the various sciences can in general be better addressed by focusing on the models these sciences employ than by reformulating the products of these sciences in some appropriate language. My model-theoretic realist account of science lies decidedly within the non-statement context, although I retain the notion of a theory as a deductively closed set of sentences (expressed in some appropriate language), in this paper I shall focus -- against the background of a model-theoretic account of science -- on the approach to the reality-science dichotomy offered by Nancy Cartwright and briefly comment on a few aspects of Roy Bhaskar's transcendental realism. I shall, in conclusion, show how a model-theoretic approach such as mine can combine the best of these two approaches. (shrink)

I am arguing that it is only by concentrating on the role of models in theory construction, interpretation and change, that one can study the progress of science sensibly. I define the level at which these models operate as a level above the purely empirical (consisting of various systems in reality) but also indeed below that of the fundamental formal theories (expressed linguistically). The essentially multi-interpretability of the theory at the general, abstract linguistic level, implies that it can potentially make (...) claims about systems in reality, other than the particular one which originally induced it. Any so-called correspondence relation between (systems in) reality and the entities and relations in some scientific theory, thus consists of two jumps or interpretations: from the theory (linguistic level) to some model of it (constructural level); and from there to some system in reality. Clearly then the level of fundamental theories cannot be ignored la Nancy Cartwright - in studying the relations between a theory and reality, because the particular features of the theory (the various systems in reality onto which the theory can be mapped) cannot be studied without the underlying knowledge that these systems have one common feature, namely that each of them is the range (or other pole) of a mapping of a context-specific model of the theory - which in itself, is a mapping, or more specifically, an interpretation of the theory. I am also claiming that the nature of these levels and the relations between them necessitate an epistemological rather than an ontological notion of truth criteria, and a referential rather than a representational link between science and reality. (shrink)

Co-éditions avec la Maison descartes d'Amsterdam Les 29 et 30 novembre 1979 s'est tenu à la Maison Descartes (Institut Français d'Amsterdam) un colloque franco-néerlandais sur le thème de "L'Enfermement", sous la présidence de Charles Grivel du côté néerlandais et de Michel Deguy du côté français.Les intervenants venaient d'horizons divers. Poètes, comme Maurice Roche pour la France et Rein Bloem pour les Pyas-Bas. Psychanalyste: Anton Mooij. Sociologues: le néerlandais Pieter Nijhoff et le français Jean Duvignaud. Historiens: Robert Muchembled. Professeurs de (...) littérature française (Roger Kempf) et de linguistique (Teun van Dijk).Cette diversité dans la formation, cette convergence des points de vue, voilà peut-être ce qui a permis de cerner le difficile concept d'enfermement. S'agit-il bien d'ailleurs d'un concept? N'est-ce pas là un mythe à la mode? Toutes les civilisations, toutes les sociétés définissent et suscitent, chaque fois d'une manière différente et pour elles-même, une certaine expérience de l'enfermememnt. Pour la mort ou la sexualité sans doute, mais aussi pour l'art et le savoir: les idéologies ou les doctrines ne sont-elles pas aussi des formes de l'enfermement? Il s'agit alors de se demander pourquoi notre époque, et plus particulièrement une certaine situation de la société intellectuelle, valorise, non sans complaisance, cet "enfermement". (shrink)

Starting with service robotics and industrial robotics, this paper aims to suggest philosophical reflections about the relationship between body and machine, between man and technology in our contemporary world. From the massive use of the cell phone to the robots which apparently “feel” and show emotions like humans do. From the wearable exoskeleton to the prototype reproducing the artificial sense of touch, technological progress explodes to the extent of embodying itself in our nakedness. Robotics, indeed, is inspired by biology in (...) order to develop a new kind of technology affecting human life. This is a bio-robotic approach, which is fulfilled in the figure of the cyborg and consequently in the loss of human nature. Today, humans have reached the possibility to modify and create their own body following their personal desires. But what is the limit of this achievement? For this reason, we all must question ourselves whether we have or whether we are a body. (shrink)

In Searle’s social ontology, collective intentionality is an essential component of all institutional facts. This is because the latter involve the assignment of functions, namely "status functions," on entities whose physical features do not guarantee their performance, therefore requiring our acceptance that it be performed. One counter-example to that claim can be found in Carl Menger’s individualistic account of the money system. Menger’s commitment to the self-interest assumption, however, prevents him from accounting for the deontic dimensions of institutional facts.

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, specifically, how (...) we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Note.

William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known are the medical fixations that united his multiple identities and drove his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and soul. William James, M.D. offers an account of the development and cultural significance of James's ideas and works, and establishes, for the first time, the relevance of medical themes to his major lines of thought. James lived at a time when (...) old assumptions about faith and the moral and religious possibilities for human worth and redemption were increasingly displaced by a concern with the medically "normal" and the perfectibility of the body. Woven into treatises warning of the degeneration of humanity, these ideas comprised the origins of the eugenics movement and were manifest in a growing social stigma attached to illness and invalidism, a disturbing intellectual current in which James felt personally implicated. Most chronicles of James's life have portrayed a distressed young man, a psychological or spiritual crisis, followed by the emergence of a mature thinker who threw off his pallor of mental sickness for good. In contrast, Emma Sutton draws on his personal correspondence, unpublished notebooks, and diaries to show that James considered himself a genuine invalid to the end of his days. Sutton makes the compelling case that his philosophizing was not an abstract occupation but an impassioned response to his own life experiences and challenges. To ignore the medical James is to misread James altogether. Sales points: First book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the disciplinary breadth of his work Reveals how themes of invalidism, health, and healing underpinned the genesis of many of James's major philosophical, psychological, and political ideas Draws on the approximately 9,400 items of Jamesian correspondence, together with his private notes and reading lists. (shrink)

A passer du temps dans des studios de danse, voilà ce qu'on peut apprendre : nous, mammifères humaines, habitantes de Terra, sommes mouvementées par une multitude de forces. Loin d'être automobiles, loin d'être contenues ou contenables dans la petite usine de nos corps, nous débordons. Les écologies scientifiques nous en convainquent, les écologies politiques nous appellent à en faire une force insurrectionnelle. Et si nous apprenions, avec les écologies somatiques, à sentir et à célébrer nos débordements plus qu'humains? A l'heure (...) où les soulèvements de la terre se multiplient, ce livre examine la manière dont certaines formes de danse (improvisations collectives, pratiques somatiques, installations chorégraphiques) tentent d'élaborer, dans les plis du monde mondialisé, des antidotes à l'anesthésie. Des manières de nouer nos gestes au-delà des fausses frontières de l'individu et de l'humain. des manières de danser-sentir- penser l'enchevêtrement de nos mouvements"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

When we accept oppression of some, we feed the oppression of others, and we make space for domination driven by false ideas of inferiority and lesser worth. When we discount the inherent preciousness of animals who think and feel, we erase precious parts of ourselves. When we consider living beings as "livestock," it's no wonder we pillage the unthinking yet irreplaceable living earth. Sub-Human is a robustly researched, sharply critical yet comfortingly human call to arms, diving deeply into the theory (...) behind oppression, liberation, and the intersections within it. Exploring the history of animal consumption and commodification, this book deconstructs the current sociopolitical climate surrounding animal enterprises by looking at how we got here. Most importantly, it unravels how we can work towards a collectively liberated world. (shrink)

relevant to the differences between the two speakings, Odile’s words in the first case said what was false, while in the second case they said what was true. Both spoke of the same state of the world, or the same refrigerator in the same condition. So, in the first case, the words said what is false of a refrigerator with but a milk puddle; in the second case they said what is true of such a refrigerator.

Scientists, philosophers, and policymakers disagree about how to define microaggression. Here, we offer a taxonomy of existing definitions, clustering around (a) the psychological motives of perpetrators, (b) the experience of victims, and (c) the functional role of microaggression in oppressive social structures. We consider conceptual and epistemic challenges to each and suggest that progress may come from developing novel hybrid accounts of microaggression, combining empirically tractable features with sensitivity to the testimony of victims.

This paper examines the concept of medical necessity as it relates to mental health care rationing, arguing that the normal functioning model of medical necessity is insufficient because it fails to cohere with an important aim and function of mental health care, which is to provide support for individuals in abusive or otherwise difficult personal relationships.

Writing Migration through the Body builds a study of the body as a mutable site for negotiating and articulating the transnational experience of mobility. At its core stands a selection of recent migration stories in Italian, which are brought into dialogue with related material from cultural studies and the visual arts. Occupying no single disciplinary space, and drawing upon an elaborate theoretical framework ranging from phenomenology to anthropology, human geography and memory studies, this volume explores the ways in which the (...) skin itself operates as a border, and brings to the surface the processes by which a sense of place and self are described and communicated through the migrant body. Through investigating key concepts and practices of transnational embodied experience, the book develops the interpretative principle that the individual bodies which move in contemporary migration flows are the primary agents through which the transcultural passages of images, emotions, ideas, memories - and also histories and possible futures - are enacted. (shrink)

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, specifically, how (...) we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)