In this chapter, I outline and defend a version of concept empiricism. The theory has four central tenets: Concepts represent categories by reliable causal relations to category instances; conceptual representations of category vary from occasion to occasion; these representations are perceptually based; and these representations are all learned, not innate. The last two tenets on this list have been central to empiricism historically, and the first two have been developed in more recent years. I look at each (...) in turn, and then I discuss the most obvious objection to empiricism. According to that objection, some concepts cannot be perceptually based because they represent things that are abstract, and hence unperceivable. I discuss two standard examples: democracy and moral badness. I argue that both can be explained using resources available to the empiricist. (shrink)

Concepts are the constituents of thoughts. Therefore, concepts are vital to any theory of cognition. However, despite their widely accepted importance, there is little consensus about the nature and origin of concepts. Thanks to the work of Lawrence Barsalou, Jesse Prinz and others concept empiricism has been gaining momentum within the philosophy and psychology literature. Concept empiricism maintains that all concepts are copies, or combinations of copies, of perceptual representations—that is, all concepts are couched in the (...) codes of perceptual representation systems. It is widely agreed that any satisfactory theory of concepts must account for how concepts semantically compose (the compositionality requirement) and explain how their intentional content is determined (the content determination requirement). In this paper, I argue that concept empiricism has serious problems satisfying these two requirements. Therefore, although stored perceptual representations may facilitate some traditionally conceptual tasks, concepts should not be identified with copies of perceptual representations. (shrink)

Concept empiricists are committed to the claim that the vehicles of thought are re-activated perceptual representations. Evidence for empiricism comes from a range of neuroscientific studies showing that perceptual regions of the brain are employed during cognitive tasks such as categorization and inference. I examine the extant neuroscientific evidence and argue that it falls short of establishing this core empiricist claim. During conceptual tasks, the causal structure of the brain produces widespread activity in both perceptual and non-perceptual systems. (...) I lay out several conditions on what is required for a neural state to be a realizer of the functional role played by concepts, and argue that no subset of this activity can be singled out as the unique neural vehicle of conceptual thought. Finally, I suggest that, while the strongest form of empiricism is probably false, the evidence is consistent with several weaker forms of empiricism. (shrink)

In this commentary, I focus on Machery's criticism of Neo-Empiricism. I argue that Neo-Empiricism can survive Machery's critique, and I show that there is an empiricist strategy for forestalling eliminativism.

Dove and Machery both argue that recent findings about the nature of numerical representation present problems for Concept Empiricism. I shall argue that, whilst this evidence does challenge certain versions of CE, such as Prinz, it needn’t be seen as problematic to the general CE approach. Recent research can arguably be seen to support a CE account of number concepts. Neurological and behavioral evidence suggests that systems involved in the perception of numerical properties are also implicated in numerical (...) cognition. Furthermore, the discovery of associations between spatial and numerical representations also lends independent support to a CE approach. Although these findings support CE in general, certain versions of the theory may need revising in order to accommodate them. In particular, it may be necessary to either jettison Prinz's Modal Specificity Hypothesis or to revise one’s method for individuating modal representational formats. (shrink)

The majority of Polish phenomenologists never found Husserl’s transcendental idealism attractive. In this paper I investigate the source of this rather surprising realist attitude. True enough the founder of Polish phenomenology was Roman Ingarden - one of the most severe critics of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, so it is initially tempting to reduce the whole issue to this sociological fact. However, I argue that there must be something more about Ingarden’s intellectual background that immunized him against Husserl’s transcendental argumentation, and that (...) the same background made his students so sympathetic to his “naive” realism. My claim is thatthis “something” is Ingarden’s realist concept of truth that he learned (at least partially) from Tarski as opposed to Husserl’s epistemic construal that he took from Brentano. (shrink)

Hume invokes the separability of perceptions to derive some of his most contentious pronouncements. To assess the cogency of the arguments, the notion must first be clarified. The clarification reveals that sic different separability claims must be distinguished. Of these, I consider the three that are rarely discussed. They turn out to be unacceptable. Locke espouses none of them.This Article does not have an abstract.

This article shows that Hegel’s analysis of ‘Perception’ (PhdG, ch. 2) is a critique of Hume’s analysis, ‘Of Scepticism with regard to the senses’ (Treatise, I.iv §2). To extend his concept-empiricism to handle the non-logical concept of the identity of a perceptible thing, Hume must appeal to several psychological ‘propensities’ to generate, in effect, a priori concepts; he must confront a ‘contradiction’ in the concept of the identity of a perceptible thing; and he must regard this (...) concept as a ‘fiction’. Hegel reexamines Hume’s account to show that the concept of the identity of a perceptible thing is non-logical and cannot be defined in accord with concept-empiricism. This important point supports Hegel’s concept-pragmatism. This point is also important in connection with the quite general problem of how we bring various sensations together into the perception of any one object. (English translation by the author of „Vom Skeptizismus in Bezug auf die Sinne oder das Ding und die Täuschung“.). (shrink)

According to the received view, Hume is a much more rigorous and consistent concept-empiricist than Locke. Hume is supposed to have taken as a starting point Locke's meaning-empiricism, and worked out its full radical implications. Locke, by way of contrast, cowered from drawing his theory's strange consequences. The received view about Locke's and Hume's concept-empiricism is mistaken, I shall argue. Hume may be more uncompromising (although he too falters), but he is not more rigorous than Locke. (...) It is not because of (intellectual) timidity that Locke does not draw Hume's conclusions from his empiricism. It is, rather, because of his much sounder method. (shrink)

According to the received view, Hume is a much more rigorous and consistent concept-empiricist than Locke. Hume is supposed to have taken as a starting point Locke's meaning-empiricism, and worked out its full radical implications. Locke, by way of contrast, cowered from drawing his theory's strange consequences. The received view about Locke's and Hume's concept-empiricism is mistaken, I shall argue. Hume may be more uncompromising (although he too falters), but he is not more rigorous than Locke. (...) It is not because of (intellectual) timidity that Locke does not draw Hume's conclusions from his empiricism. It is, rather, because of his much sounder method. (shrink)

The paper discusses the relation of philosophical pragmatism to empiricism as the backdrop to understanding human being. The crux of the problem is the relation between language and experience. The author argues that pragmatist empiricism is based on the concept that human practices are transactions, which includes both non-linguistic as well as linguistic practices. Within pragmatist anthropological philosophy, experience is a complex of transactions between humans and reality. Humans are both natural/physical and cultural/linguistic beings, whose living experience (...) involves transactions with both the natural and the sociocultural environment. The dualism between language and experience is false and should be abandoned. (shrink)

One might think that a healthy respect for the deliverances of experience would require us to give up any claim to nontrivial a priori knowledge. One way it might not would be if the very admission of something as an episode of experience required the use of substantive a priori knowledge -- if there were certain a priori standards that a representation had to meet in order to count as an experience, rather than as, say, a memory or daydream. This (...) paper argues that, surprisingly enough, we can find elements of this essentially Kantian line about experience even in the work of empiricists, such as John Locke and Bas van Fraassen. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a comparison between the philosophies of Husserl and James in relation to their concepts of experience. Whereas various authors have acknowledged the affinity between James’ early psychology and Husserl’s phenomenology, the late development of James’ philosophy is often considered in opposition to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. This is because James’ radical empiricism achieves a non-dual dimension of experience that precedes the functional division into subject and object, thus contrasting with the phenomenological analysis of the dual (...) structure of intentionality. However, I argue that the later “genetic” development of phenomenology converges with some central aspects of James’ radical empiricism. This is because genetic phenomenology leads us to conceive of the flow of primal impressions as a fundamental dimension of experience that precedes the subject-object duality and is at the base of the process of co-constitution of the subject and the object in reciprocal dependence. At the same time, Husserl conceives of the impressional core of experience as structured by formal conditions that depend on the concrete constitution of an embodied subject. For this reason, I argue that Husserl’s genetic phenomenology can complement James’ radical empiricism, thus leading to the development of the doctrine of pure experience as a form of empirical and not metaphysical realism. (shrink)

This article examines the role of concepts in the so-called 'new' empiricism that is currently emerging from the writings of Gilles Deleuze. It asks what concepts are, and how they might be put to work to present the 'pure difference' of the empirical world. In addressing these questions, a number of parallels and contrasts are drawn between the writings of Deleuze and Max Weber. It is shown that many of Deleuze's key arguments about concepts- in particular, that they are (...) pedagogical, multiple, networked and problem-oriented in basis - are anticipated by Weber's sociological methodology of concept formation. This leads, finally, to a consideration of whether the creation of concepts as a practice belongs primarily within the domain of philosophy (as argued by Deleuze), or if it is a key part of social scientific work more generally. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that metaphysical assumptions, commitments and presuppositions play an important role in science. Yet according to the empiricist there is no place for metaphysics as traditionally understood in the scientific enterprise. In this paper I aim to take a first step towards reconciling these seemingly irreconcilable claims. In the first part of the paper I outline a conception of metaphysics and its relation to science that should be congenial to empiricists, motivated by van Fraassen’s work on ‘stances’. (...) There has been a considerable amount of recent work devoted to van Fraassen’s ‘stance’ view, but it has not on the whole been noticed that the view has the potential to motivate a general empiricist conception of the relation between science and metaphysics. In the second and third sections I discuss two examples from biology to illustrate this conception: metaphysical punctuationism, and its relation to and influence on the thesis of punctuated equilibrium; and dialectical biology as defended by Levins and Lewontin. (shrink)

We argue that a conflict between two conceptions of “quantity of matter” employed in a corollary to proposition 6 of Book III of the Principia illustrates a deeper conflict between Newton’s view of the nature of extended bodies and the concept of mass appropriate for the theoretical framework of the Principia. We trace Newton’s failure to recognize the conflict to the fact that he allowed for the justification of natural philosophical claims by two types of a posteriori, empiricist methodologies. (...) Newton's thoughts on these methodologies demonstrate that his natural philosophy continued to develop after the publication of the first edition of Principia and that De Grav should be understood as an early, and not necessarily representative, text. (shrink)

Alan Musgrave, Michael Friedman, Jeffrey Foss, and Richard Creath raised different objections against the Distinction between observables and unobservables when drawn within the confines of Bas C. van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism, to the effect that the Distinction cannot be drawn there coherently. Van Fraassen has only responded to Musgrave but Musgrave claimed not to understand van Fraassen's succinct response. I argue that van Fraassen's response is not enough. What remains in the end is an unsolved problem which CE cannot (...) afford to leave unsolved, or so I argue; I then strengthen Musgrave's criticism and indicate that an extension of the epistemic policy of CE is mandatory to solve the problem. I also argue that Friedman's and Foss' objection against the Distinction in CE misses the mark on closer inspection. An objection due to Creath does hit the mark but can be taken care of without too much ado. All these objections seem alive and kicking until the present day; I try to put them all to rest. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant's account of force, a topic that was of central philosophical concern in his day, but which he does not explicitly address in any of his Critiques. Just as with the nature of space and time and the nature of the human will, the nature of force was under dispute by the philosophers and natural scientists to whose legacy Kant was responding. Yet, Kant does not make force an explicit topic of his Critiques, and thus provides no (...) explicit transcendental account of force. Nevertheless, I will argue that one can indeed find in Kant a transcendental account of force, one that is a synthesis of empiricist and rationalist accounts, but in an unexpected place; the third Critique, in the discussion of the principle of purposiveness. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Sellars' Two‐Ply Account of Observation “Looks” Talk and Sellars' Diagnosis of the Cartesian Hypostatization of Appearances Two Confirmations of the Analysis of “Looks” Talk in Terms of the Two‐Ply Account of Observation A Rationalist Account of the Acquisition of Empirical Concepts Giving Theoretical Concepts an Observational Use Conclusion: On the Relation Between the Two Components.

The clinical empiricism of Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) and his definition of especie morbosae represented a substantial turn in the medicine of his time. This turn supposed the shift towards an ontological conception of diseases, from a qualitative to quantitative interpretation. Sydenham’s clinical proposal had a great influence on empiricism philosophical thinking, particularly in John Locke and his delimitation of knowledge. The dialogue between medicine and philosophy, set out by Sydenham-Locke, reactivates the problem of the clinical and theoretical foundations (...) of medical thought, as well as the limits of scientific knowledge. Similar to problem exposed in the Hippocratic treatise On ancient medicine, seventeenth-century medicine seeks its epistemological foundations and the solution to its difficulties in clinical experience, probability and analogy. The aim of this work is to show the Sydenham’s contribution to one of the great controversies between medicine and philosophy. (shrink)

We sley Salmon, in his influential and detailed book, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, argues that the pragmatic approach to scientific explanation, “construed as the claim that scientific explanation can be explicated entirely in pragmatic terms” (1989, 185) is inadequate. The specific inadequacy ascribed to a pragmatic account is that objective relevance relations cannot be incorporated into such an account. Salmon relies on the arguments given in Kitcher and Salmon (1987) to ground this objection. He also suggests that Peter Railton’s (...) concepts of the ideal explanatory text and explanatory information (Railton 1981) can provide what the pragmatic approach lacks. This suggestion is not a conclusion of course; we read it as the promotion of part of a research program aimed at forging a greater consensus on scientific explanation-an admirable goal. However, we do not see the pragmatic approach as inadequate. We will show that a synthetic account inspired by Salmon’s adaptation of Railton would be equivalent to van Fraassen’s pragmatic account in three respects: accepting or rejecting requests for explanation; the practice of giving scientific explanations; and the evaluation of the goodness of explanations. We include all three under the general rubric of explanatory “practice.” Admittedly these are not the only three features by which an account of explanation might be evaluated. Roughly, we mean to show that a synthetic account cannot do a better job of accounting for the scientific practices which are of importance to the constructive empiricist, and therefore no argument can be presented to the constructive empiricist to convince her that by her own standards the synthetic account is superior. (shrink)

The present paper deals with the ontological status of numbers and considers Frege ́s proposal in Grundlagen upon the background of the Post-Kantian semantic turn in analytical philosophy. Through a more systematic study of his philosophical premises, it comes to unearth a first level paradox that would unset earlier still than it was exposed by Russell. It then studies an alternative path, that departin1g from Frege’s initial premises, drives to a conception of numbers as synthetic a priori in a more (...) Kantian sense. On this basis, it tentatively explores a possible derivation of basic logical rules on their behalf, suggesting a more rudimentary basis to inferential thinking, which supports reconsidering the difference between logical thinking and AI. Finally, it reflects upon the contributions of this approach to the problem of the a priori. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I critically examine the philosophy of transcendental empiricism. Transcendental empiricism is, among other things, a philosophy of mental content. It attempts to dissolve an epistemological dilemma of mental content by splitting the difference between two diametrically opposed accounts of content. John McDowell's minimal empiricism and Richard Gaskin's minimalist empiricism are two versions of transcendental empiricism. Transcendental empiricism itself originates with McDowell's work. This dissertation is divided into five parts. First, in the (...) Introduction, I state the Wittgensteinian metaphilosophical orientation of transcendental empiricism. This metaphilosophical approach provides a plateau upon which much of the rest of this work may be examined. Second, I offer a detailed description of McDowell’s minimal empiricism. Third, I critique Gaskin's critique and modification of McDowell's minimal empiricism. I argue that (1) Gaskin's critiques are faulty and that (2) Gaskin's minimalist empiricism is very dubious. Fourth, I scrutinize the alleged credentials of McDowell's minimal empiricism. I argue that McDowell's version of linguistic idealism is problematic. I then comment on a recent dialogue between transcendental empiricism and Hubert Dreyfus's phenomenology. The dialogue culminates with Dreyfus's accusation of the “Myth of the Mental.” I argue that this accusation is correct in which case McDowell's direct realism is problematic. I conclude that minimal empiricism does not dissolve the dilemma of mental content. Finally, I argue that Tyler Burge successfully undermines the doctrine of disjunctivism, but disjunctivism is crucial for transcendental empiricism. Ultimately, however, I aim to show that transcendental empiricism is an attractive alternative to philosophies of mental content. (shrink)

Originally published in 1986. Wittgenstein, William James, Thomas Kuhn and John Wisdom share an attitude towards problems in the theory of knowledge which is fundamentally in conflict with the empiricist tradition. They encourage the idea that in understanding the central concepts of epistemology – objectivity, certainty and reasoning – people and their practices matter most. This clash between orthodox empiricism and a freshly inspired pragmatism forms the background to the strands of argument in this book. With these philosophers as (...) a guide, it points to new directions by showing how the theory of knowledge can be shaped around our actions without sacrificing reason’s control over our beliefs. (shrink)

In this article I argue for an empiricist view on laws. Some laws are fundamental in the sense that they are the result of inductive generalisations of observed regularities and at the same time in their formulation contain a new theoretical predicate. The inductive generalisations simul- taneously function as implicit definitions of these new predicates. Other laws are either explicit definitions or consequences of other previously established laws. I discuss the laws of classical mechanics, relativity theory and electromagnetism in detail. (...) Laws are necessary, whereas acciden- tal generalisations are not. But necessity here is not a modal concept, but rather interpreted as short for the semantic predicate “... is necessarily true”. Thus no modal logic is needed. The neces- sity attributed to law sentences is in turn interpreted as “necessary condition for the rest of the the- ory”, which is true since fundamental laws are implicit definitions of theoretical predicates use in the theory. (shrink)

This text provides an extensive exploration of the relationship between the thought of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, providing a new argument for the complementarity of their mature philosophies as part of a collaborative metatheory of science. In arguing that both Neurath and Carnap must be interpreted as proponents of epistemological naturalism, and that their naturalisms rest on shared philosophical ground, it is also demonstrated that the boundaries and possibilities for epistemological naturalism are not as restrictive as Quinean orthodoxy has (...) previously suggested. Both building on and challenging the scholarship of the past four decades, this naturalist reading of Carnap also provides a new interpretation of Carnap’s conception of analyticity, allowing for a refutation of the Quinean argument for the incompatibility of naturalism and the analytic/synthetic distinction. In doing so, the relevance and potential importance of their scientific meta-theory for contemporary questions in the philosophy of science is demonstrated. This text appeals to students and researchers working on Logical Empiricism, Quine, the history of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy of science, as well as proponents of naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

. Based on a reconstruction of the development of Rudolf Carnap’s views from the Aufbau until the 1960s, this paper provides an account of the philosopher’s understanding of non-cognitivism, which is here seen as in line with the so-called scientific world-conception of left-wing logical empiricism. The starting point of Carnap’s conception is the claim that every human decision depends on certain attitudes that cannot be justified at a cognitive level, that are neither based on empirical facts nor logical reasoning. (...) The key features of Carnap’s non-cognitivism, however, go beyond this general basis and involve several fundamentally moral commitments, such as a commitment toward science, and the embracing of moral attitudes as the result of a long-term process of rational discourse. I argue that these commitments contained in Carnap’s non-cognitivism/scientific world-conception establish a genuinely political worldview that is characteristic of left-wing logical empiricism and converges with socialism and democracy. (shrink)

Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and (...) yet delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. (shrink)

Professor Monro presents an original view of ethics based on empiricism, which leads him to a subjectivist position about moral values. He starts by examining the central problem in moral philosophy: are moral statements objectively true, or are they expressions of preference? The first view conflicts with the empiricist beliefs current in modern thought; the opposing naturalistic theory seems to lead to moral scepticism. After discussing both views, the author presents a detailed defence of the subjectivist position. In the (...) course of his argument he gives a detailed analysis and criticism of the 'universalisability thesis', the theory that moral aspirations differ from others in being applicable to all men, and that it is this that makes them moral. He then offers an alternative account of the nature of moral attitudes. The author illustrates his explanations with straightforward analogies and examples. His clear exposition of the fundamental concepts arising in his argument makes this a book for students as well as for professional moral philosophers. (shrink)

Hume sought to analyse our propositionally-structured thought in terms of our ultimate awareness of nothing but objects, sensory impressions or their imagistic copies, The ideas of space and time are often regarded as exceptions to his Copy Theory of impressions and ideas. On grounds strictly internal to Humes account of the generality of thought. This ultimately reveals the limits of the Copy Theory and of Concept Empiricism. The key is to recognise how very capacious is our (Humean) imaginative (...) capacity to associate particular perceptions by various fine-grained determinable resemblances. (shrink)

According to modal empiricism, our justification for believing possibility and necessity claims is a posteriori. That is, experience does not merely play an enabling role in modal justification; it isn’t simply that experience explains how, say, we acquire the relevant concepts. Rather, the view is that modal claims answer to the tribunal of experience in roughly the way that claims about quarks and quails answer to it. One serious objection to modal empiricism is the problem of empirical conservativeness: (...) it doesn’t seem that experience can distinguish between modal claims. And if experience can’t manage that, it’s hard to see how it can provide evidence for one claim over the other. So if modal empiricism is true, we ought to be modal skeptics. On the assumption that we shouldn’t be modal skeptics, we should reject modal empiricism. I have two aims here: first, to reply to this objection to modal empiricism; second, to sketch a modal epistemology that fits with the reply I offer. (shrink)

In recent times it has become fashionable to emphasize the role of conceptual change in the history of science. To judge from recent writers, every significant theoretical change in science is first and foremost a revolution in scientific concepts—a conceptual revolution. According to this view, every level of experience is affected by each fundamental theoretical change: physical theory, experimental practice and even perceptual experience. The Aristotelian patrician who watched the sun sink beneath the horizon not only had different beliefs about (...) the phenomenon but actually saw something different from the Newtonian gentleman who saw the horizon rise above his eye-sun line, and the Einsteinian professional who saw the sun's varying geometrical relations to the world light-geodesics on which successive temporal stages of his eye world-line lay. Moreover, such is the completeness of the conceptual-experiential shifts undergone in a fundamental scientific change that it is impossible to meaningfully discuss the one theory within the confines of the other or, indeed, to provide any systematic, cumulative comparison of successive theories. (shrink)