The Limits of Logical Empiricism: Selected Papers of Arthur Pap

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Springer Science & Business Media, Mar 2, 2006 - Philosophy - 394 pages

This volume brings together a selection of the most philosophically significant papers of Arthur Pap. As Sanford Shieh explains in the Introduction to this volume, Pap’s work played an important role in the development of the analytic tradition. This role goes beyond the merely historical fact that Pap’s views of dispositional and modal concepts were influential. As a sympathetic critic of logical empiricism, Pap, like Quine, saw a deep tension in logical empiricism at its very best in the work of Carnap. But Pap’s critique of Carnap is quite different from Quine’s, and represents the discovery of limits beyond which empiricism cannot go, where there lies nothing other than intuitive knowledge of logic itself. Pap’s arguments for this intuitive knowledge anticipate Etchemendy’s recent critique of the model-theoretic account of logical consequence. Pap’s work also anticipates prominent developments in the contemporary neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics championed by Wright and Hale. Finally, Pap’s major philosophical preoccupation, the concepts of necessity and possibility, provides distinctive solutions and perspectives on issues of contemporary concern in the metaphysics of modality. In particular, Pap’s account of modality allows us to see the significance of Kripke’s well-known arguments on necessity and apriority in a new light.

This volume will be of interest to all researchers in the philosophical history of the analytic tradition, in philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, and contemporary analytic metaphysics.

 

Contents

XVII
47
XVIII
57
XIX
77
XX
91
XXI
109
XXII
117
XXIII
122
XXIV
132
XLI
243
XLII
247
XLIII
249
XLIV
254
XLV
259
XLVI
264
XLVII
269
XLVIII
281

XXV
137
XXVI
145
XXVII
147
XXVIII
155
XXIX
165
XXX
181
XXXI
187
XXXII
195
XXXIII
197
XXXIV
205
XXXV
213
XXXVI
216
XXXVII
219
XXXVIII
226
XXXIX
233
XL
237
XLIX
285
L
295
LI
317
LII
327
LIII
351
LIV
352
LV
355
LVI
360
LVII
363
LVIII
365
LIX
369
LX
375
LXI
381
LXII
393
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Page 14 - Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws.
Page 14 - But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience.
Page 14 - Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field.
Page ii - Honorary Editor: JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University, USA Editors: DIRK VAN DALEN, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands...
Page 17 - Q»' is not established completely, but only for the cases in which the test condition is fulfilled. In other cases, eg for the match in our previous example, neither the predicate nor its negation can be attributed. We may diminish this region of indeterminateness of the predicate by adding one or several more laws which contain the predicate and connect it with other terms available in our language. These further laws may have the form of reduction sentences (as in the example of the electric current)...
Page 17 - ... of the predicate by adding one or several more laws which contain the predicate and connect it with other terms available in our language. These further laws may have the form of reduction sentences ( as in the example of the electric current) or a different form. In the case of the predicate "soluble in water" we may perhaps add the law stating that two bodies of the same substance are either both soluble or both not soluble. This law would help in the instance of the match; it would, in accordance...