In Rudolph Camap (,) established himself as a professor in Vienna. The philosophical atmosphere awaiting him there was not new to him: the year before he ...

Collingwood has failed to make a significant impact in the history of twentieth century philosophy either because he has been dismissed as a dusty old idealist committed to the very metaphysics the analytical school was trying to leave behind, or because his later work has been interpreted as advocating the dissolution of philosophy into history. I argue that Collingwood's key philosophical works are a sustained attempt to defend the view that philosophy is an autonomous discipline with a distinctive domain of (...) inquiry and that Collingwood's attempt to defend the autonomy of philosophy is intimately connected to his defence of intensional notions against the kind of meaning scepticism which came to prevail from the 1920s. I defend the philosophical claim that there is a third way between the idealist metaphysics with which Collingwood is often associated and the neo-empiricist agenda which characterised analytic philosophy in mid-century by defending the hermeneutic thesis that Collingwood's work is a sustained attempt to articulate a conception of philosophy as an epistemologically first science. Since there is a via media between the old metaphysics and the new empiricism there is no need to choose between a certain kind of armchair metaphysics and a scientifically informed ontology. (shrink)

There is a general consensus that Quine’s assault on analyticity and verificationism in ‘Two Dogma of Empiricism’ has been successful and that Carnap’s philosophical position has been vanquished. This paper so characterises Carnap’s position that it escapes Quine’s criticisms. It shows that the disagreement is not a first order dispute about analyticity or verificationism, but rather a deeper dispute about philosophical method.

there be an objective modal distinction between the observable and the unobservable.’ My intent is to counter Ladyman's claim that the irreducibly modal character of empirical adequacy is something that is ‘really wrong with constructive empiricism’. I argue that disposition concepts refer to non-modal properties of types rather than to modal properties of tokens of those types. Solubility, for example, is an ‘occurrent’, though unobservable, property of a type of substance (involving the structure of associated atoms); and observability is, (...) similarly, an ‘occurrent’, though unobservable, property of a type of event (involving the structure of associated physical systems). Empirical adequacy, like truth, is an objective, semantic notion; the empirical adequacy of a theory depends upon all actual tokens of the relevant observable type, not just upon the tokens that have actually been observed. Introduction The typical character of disposition concepts Confirmational versus semantic empirical adequacy Conclusion. (shrink)

The paper argues against a commitment to metaphysical necessity, semantic modalities are enough. The best approaches to elucidate the semantic modalities are (still) versions of lingustic ersatzism and fictionalism, even if only developed in parts. Within these necessary properties and the difference between natural and semantic laws can be accounted for. The proper background theory for this is an updated version of Logical Empiricism, which is congenial to recent trends in Structural Realism. The anti-metaphysical attitude of Logical Empiricism (...) deserves revitalization. Another target besides metaphysical necessity are substantial forms of iterated modalities, as used, for instance, in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

. Once constituted, scientific facts have a way of roaming about on their own in the world, much divorced from the circumstances of their original constitution. An important part of Latour and Woolgar's discussion in Laboratory Life was to draw attention to how facts are used once they are at the final stage of their constitution. What I propose to do here is to go one step further, and to follow a single fact around in the wild—to tag it, as (...) it were, much as a biologist might tag an animal with a radio collar—and then look to see where it turns up. The fact I have chosen is especially taggable, simply because it happens to be fantastic: I refer to the fact that magnets will lose their power of attraction if they are rubbed with garlic. This fact is also useful because it shows up in authors spanning fifteen centuries, from Plutarch through Rabelais and beyond, and over this time it shows some interesting behaviors. Of course, in the end, the garlic-magnet antipathy was disproved, and so changed its epistemological status, moving from one extreme to the other: from the obviously true to the obviously ridiculous. What struck Rabe-. (shrink)

This article examines and assesses Bernard Hodgson’s critique of the Neoclassical concept of rationality and its place in the literature. It is argued that Hodgson’s Trojan horse critique is superior to the others because it addresses the role of empiricist epistemology in reducing reason to instrumental rationality and consequent disappearance of the human subject of political economy. The second phase of the empiricist level of analysis reintroduces the capacities for ethical deliberation, self-determination, and the socio-historical conditions and institutional setting of (...) the economic agent. Because Hodgson’s solutions presuppose empiricist terrain, they are arbitrary. This occurs because the fundamental problem of Neoclassical rationality is its ontology. Yet by introducing the human subject into economic theory, Hodgson’s solutions move onto an ontological terrain adequate for economic analysis of human subjects. (shrink)

Self-knowledge is the cognitive ability of the agent to know his or her own mental states. There are several types of mental states, and there is a method for the knowledge of each type. The focus of this dissertation is on the knowledge of one‘s own beliefs. With this goal in mind, we present the empiricist and the rationalist approaches to the knowledge of one‘s own beliefs. Empiricist theories of self-knowledge proposes introspection as the method for the knowledge of one‘s (...) own beliefs. However, there are issues related to the phenomenology of belief – what it is like to believe that p? The best rationalist theories of self-knowledge proposes that an agent ―look outwards to constitute her own mind and her own belief. Our final question is about the relationship between knowledge of one‘s beliefs and rationality. Burge (2013) requires that, in order to be rational, one must have self-knowledge. We argue that the kind of rationality specified by Burge is too demanding. As agents in the realm of common life, we have incomplete understanding of our own doxastic mental states, but that is not a problem for the knowledge of our own beliefs as dispositions, since they does not come from rational deliberation; nevertheless, we are responsible and our beliefs as commitments. Both kinds of belief can be known by the transparency method. We conclude claiming that the transparency method is enough for the self-knowledge of doxastic mental state and ensuring the rationality of the agent. (shrink)

In the Western world, this negativistic movement has proved to be a far more serious and lasting threat. Failing to take a firm root in Europe, the place of its origin, it moved to England and North America, where the central disciplines of philosophy were found to be less firmly grounded in sound empirical traditions of academic life and thought. Here for many years it has now run its course, and has exerted a powerful destructive effect. In many secular schools (...) and universities, the history of philosophy has been neglected, logic and linguistics have replaced ontology as the focal discipline, and many philosophers, moved by the widespread fear and idolatry of "science," have abandoned the performance of their vital descriptive and synoptic functions. This has had a markedly disintegrating effect on the cultural life of the West at a time of crisis and world upheaval. (shrink)

I identify and resolve an internal tension in Critical Contextual Empiricism (CCE) – the normative account of science developed by Helen Longino. CCE includes two seemingly conflicting principles: on one hand, the cognitive goals of epistemic communities should be open to critical discussion (the openness of goals to criticism principle, OGC); on the other hand, criticism must be aligned with the cognitive goals of that community to count as “relevant” and thus require a response (the goal-relativity of response-requiring criticism (...) principle, GRC). The co-existence of OGC and GRC enables one to draw both approving and condemning judgments about a situation in which an epistemic community ignores criticism against its goals. This tension results from conflating two contexts of argumentation that require different regulative standards. In the first-level scientific discussion, GRC is a reasonable principle but OGC is not; in the meta-level discussion about science, the reverse holds. In meta-level discussion, the relevance of criticism can be established by appealing to goals of science that are more general than the goals of a specific epistemic community. To illustrate my revision of CCE, I discuss why feminist economists’ criticism of the narrowness of the goals pursued in mainstream economics is relevant criticism. (shrink)

The term ‘realism’ and its contrasting terms have various related senses, although often they occlude as much as they illuminate, especially if ontological and epistemological issues and their tenable combinations are insufficiently clarified. For example, in 1807 the infamous ‘idealist’ Hegel argued cogently that any tenable philosophical theory of knowledge must take the natural and social sciences into very close consideration, which he himself did. Here I argue that Hegel ably and insightfully defends Newton’s causal realism about gravitational force, in (...) part by exposing a fatal equivocation in the traditional concept of substance, by criticizing some still-standard empiricist misconceptions of force, by emphasizing the role of explanatory integration in Newtonian mechanics, and by using his powerful semantics of singular, specifically cognitive reference to justify fallibilism regarding empirical justification, together with the semantic core of Newton’s Rule Four of (experimental) Philosophy—in a way that highlights a key fallacy in many arguments against realism, both in epistemology and within philosophy of science. (shrink)

By starting from the idea of processes of numerical assignment, an explication, á la Kant, of the concept of property is proposed. In this way two results are achieved: on the one hand, the Kantian doctrine of explication is revaluated; on the other hand, the notion of property is tackled from an empiricist point of view based on the representational theory of measurement.

During most of his long philosophical career, Bertrand Russell was a strong moral subjectivist or emotivist who argued that ethics, because it cannot hope to arrive at truth, is not properly a part of either science or philosophy. In several works, however, most notably Philosophy and Politics and Human Society in Ethics and Politics, he attempted to bring his empiricism and his philosophy of science to bear on moral and other axiological questions. In these writings, he appears to seek (...) and to hope for the "imperium" of the title of this article, which contrasts these two positions, drawing on the former to critique the latter. (shrink)

This paper argues the case for ontological realism as against various present‐day forms of conventionalist, instrumentalist, cultural‐relativist, or anti‐realist doctrine. In particular it takes issue with Richard Rorty’s writings on philosophy of science – where these ideas receive their most extreme and provocative statement – and with Bas van Fraassen’s more moderate ‘constructive empiricist’ approach. This latter entails ontological commitment to whatever shows up through trained observation or empirical research. However, it refuses to countenance realist claims concerning the existence of (...) (as yet) unobserved entities and their role in explanatory theories premised on putative laws of nature. I maintain that van Fraassen’s position is: (1) inadequate to account for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge; (2) self‐refuting since often undermined by examples which he himself supplies; and (3) incapable of mounting resistance to other, more wholesale (e.g., Rortian) varieties of anti‐realist argument. Only by combining causal realism with a principle of inference to the best explanation can philosophy of science avoid these kinds of hyperinduced sceptical doubt. (shrink)

Three centuries of history have made us take it for granted that mechanism and empiricism are natural allies. I want to suggest in this article that that alliance ought to surprise us a good deal more than it does, and that it arose out of contingent historical circumstance. This claim is perhaps best approached by considering initially a fundamental issue upon which the mechanists of the seventeenth century were themselves divided. In the “Proemial Discourse” to The Origin of Forms (...) and Qualities, According to the Corpuscular Philosophy, Robert Boyle confronted his readers with an issue which continues to confront modern interpreters of the history of the mechanical philosophy. Boyle stated that he intended to “write rather for the Corpuscularians in general, than any party of them.” What he knew and what modern commentators have since also realized is that the interprétation of the mechanical philosophy crucially depends on whether one chooses to take seriously the conflicts which existed among the seventeenth-century proponents of mechanism or whether one decides deliberately to ignore such conflicts of party. I propose in this article to examine the historical and philosophical consequences of viewing the mechanisms of the seventeenth-century natural philosophers from each of these standpoints. In pursuing this line of inquiry, I shall call attention to certain salient features of their thought which made it rationally justifiable for them either to write for corpuscularians in general or to write for a particular party, but rationally unjustifiable to do both. (shrink)

What do religious statements tell us? The epistemology of statements to which believers dedicate their lives is of critical importance. Richard Bevan Braithwaite (1900-1990), who considers the statements of religion from a non-cognitive but conative perspective, thinks that even if the religious statements cannot be verified, they can be empirically meaningful. This meaning is analogical, drawing policy of life like in moral judgments. According to Braithwaite, these statements have no truth value as in science; the stories told in a religious (...) language only psychologically support the person to maintain the lifestyle. In short, Braithwaite eliminates the cognitive dimension of religious statements by focusing on the conative aspect. Thus, he tries to make religion meaningful so as not to get caught in the verification principle. We aim to analyze Braithwaite's theory of moral interpretation of religious language. In the introduction part of our study, we will explain the dominant paradigm of the period between 1920-1955 to reveal the reasons that prepared Braithwaite for his empiricist approach to religious belief. In this way, we will handle the verification principle, which is the cornerstone of logical positivism. Afterward, we will try to evaluate Braithwaite's ideas on the moral interpretation of the religious statements under two titles. First of all, we will try to answer from Braithwaite's point of view why religious statements cannot pass the verification test. For this, we will present the reasons for not including religious expressions in the empirical, hypothetical, and analytical categories, respectively, and we will present our criticisms. In the second part, we will find an answer to the question of where the religious statements will take place. We will touch on Braithwaite's effort to make religious expressions meaningful by charging functionality, and we will evaluate the criticisms. Afterward, we will discuss the similarities and differences between religious and moral statements and examine the problems that may arise due to Braithwaite's theory. In addition, we will evaluate Braithwaite's attitude concerning the religious stories and the criticisms toward him to distinguish religions with the same moral action. As a result, we will reveal Braithwaite's perspective on the subjectivity of religious belief and point out the possible drawbacks in terms of theism. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have become increasingly concerned with the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. The general aim of the paper is to show that approaches in social epistemology of science fail to take into account important changes that the organization of science has undergone in the past decades. I argue that the social organization of science is an important “social dimension” of scientific knowledge that philosophers need to consider. In order to do so, I focus on Helen Longino’s social epistemology (...) of science as portrayed in her critical contextual empiricism. I show that Longino’s approach has important limitations when trying to implement it as a guide for current research through an evaluation of two of her norms of effective criticism. (shrink)

How did immigrant scholars such as Rudolf Carnap, Max Horkheimer, and Alfred Schütz influence the development of American philosophy? Why was the U.S. community more receptive to logical empiricism than to critical theory or phenomenology? This volume brings together fifteen historians of philosophy to explore the impact of the intellectual migration. -/- In the 1930s, the rise of fascism forced dozens of philosophers to flee to the United States. Prominent logical empiricists acquired positions at prestigious U.S. universities. Critical theorists (...) moved their Frankfurt School to Columbia University. And a group of phenomenologists taught at the New School for Social Research. Though many refugee scholars acquired some American following, logical empiricism had the biggest impact on academic philosophy. The exiled empiricists helped the country turn into a bastion of ‘analytic philosophy’ after the war. Phenomenology and critical theory became prominent schools from the 1970s onwards and continue to be influential in American philosophy today. -/- This is the first book to investigate to the migration from an integrated perspective, bringing together historians of American philosophy, logical empiricism, phenomenology, and critical theory. (shrink)

"Space," William James confessed, "is [both] a direfully difficult subject [and the] driest of subjects.'" Nonetheless, convinced that most previous accounts of space were either incoherent or mythological, he set out to describe space as it is actually experienced. His first effort, "The Spatial Quale," appeared in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1879. 2 This article is historically important; as Ralph Barton Perry notes, "his peculiar view of the amplitude and eonnectedness of experience seems to have begun with the (...) application to space. ''3 But, despite this fact, it is seldom read today. It was not reprinted in James's Collected Essays and Reviews because the editor found "no important difference" between the content of this article and that of the chapter in The Principles of Psychology dealing with the same topic. 4 And it has not been included in more recent anthologies of James's writings. James would undoubtedly have concurred with the reasoning behind these editorial decisions. In the preface to the Psychology he wrote: Chapter 20, on Space-perception, is a terrible thing, which, unless written with all that detail, could not be fairly treated at all. An abridgment of it, called The Spatial Quale' ... may be found by some persons a useful substitute for the entire chapter? In fact, however, there is a significant philosophical difference between... (shrink)

The paper critically evaluates two commonplaces of historiography. One is that Empiricism as a philosophical movement of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was opposed to Rationalism corresponding to an English-Continental division of personnel. The other commonplace is the view that the main accomplishments of eighteenth century science were mainly taxonomic in contrast to the remarkable conceptual innovations of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. I point instead, as characteristic of eighteenth century science, to an energetic blend of hands-on experimentalism, methodological (...) caution about the employment of metaphysical concepts, and imaginative speculation where the powers of ‘matter’ unassisted by God were concerned, with Buffon playing a leading role. Kant’s attempt to confine empirical reasoning and the Newtonian system to the appearances reflects widely held views about the ‘veiling’ of nature behind our ideas in eighteenth century methodological reflection but serves mainly to ground his appeals to the supersensible element in human agency. (shrink)