After Hume, attempts to forge an empiricist epistemology have taken three forms, which I shall call the First, Middle, and Third Way. The First still attempts an a priori demonstration that our cognitive methods satisfy some criterion of adequacy. The Middle Way is pursued under the banners of naturalism and scientific realism, and aims at the same conclusion on non-apriori grounds. After arguing that both fail, I shall describe the general characteristics of the Third Way, an alternative epistemology suitable for (...) empiricism. (shrink)
James Ladyman has argued that constructive empiricism entails modal realism, and that this renders constructive empiricism untenable. We maintain that constructive empiricism is compatible with modal nominalism. Although the central term 'observable' has been analyzed in terms of counterfactuals, and in general counterfactuals do not have objective truth conditions, the property of being observable is not a modal property, and hence there are objective, non-modal facts about what is observable. Both modal nominalism and constructive empiricism require clarification in the face (...) of Ladyman's argument. But we also argue that, even if Ladyman were right that constructive empiricism entails modal realism, this would not be a problem for constructive empiricism. (shrink)
A general form is proposed for epistemological theories, the relevant factors being: the family of epistemic judgments, the epistemic state, the epistemic commitment, and the family of possible epistemic inputs. First a simple theory is examined in which the states are probability functions, and the subject of probability kinematics introduced by Richard Jeffrey is explored. Then a second theory is examined in which the state has as constituents a body of information and a recipe that determines the accepted epistemic judgments (...) on the basis of this corpus. Through an examination of several approaches to the statistical syllogism, a relation is again established with Jeffrey's generalized conditionalization. (shrink)
The world science describes tends to have a very strange look. We can’t see atoms or force fields, nor are they imaginable within visualizable categories, so neither can we even imagine what the world must be like according to recent physical theories. That tension, between what science depicts as reality and how things appear to us, though it is more striking now, has been with us since modern science began. It can be addressed, and perhaps alleviated by inquiring into how (...) science represents nature. In general, representation is selective, the selection is of what is relevant to the purpose at hand, and success may even require distortion. From this point of view, the constraint on science, that it must ‘save the phenomena’, takes on a new form. The question to be faced is how the perspectival character of the appearances (that is, contents of measurement outcomes) can be related to the hidden structure that the sciences postulate. In the competing interpretations of quantum mechanics we can see how certain traditional ideals and constraints are left behind. Specifically, Carlo Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics offers a probative example of the freedom of scientific representation. (shrink)
O presente trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar os principais aspectos do Empirismo Construtivo de Bas C. van Fraassen, particularmente no que diz respeito ao problema do sucesso científico. Nesse contexto, serão examinadas as noções de observável e inobservável e suas relações com o ‘argumento do milagre’ e da ‘coincidência cósmica’, ambos criticados por van Fraassen. As respostas de autores que defendem o Realismo Científico serão então apresentadas, contrapondo-se aos argumentos do Empirismo Construtivo. Finalmente, possíveis dificuldades do Empirismo Construtivo (...) serão ainda examinadas e uma proposta para superá-las será apresentada. (shrink)
El artículo pretende mostrar la relectura que van Fraassen propone en varios artículos recientes de algunas ideas relevantes de W. James. En concreto sobre los tópicos relacionados con el diseño de un nuevo empirismo y sus relaciones con el Pragmatismo. Esta perspectiva permite desarrollar una imagen diferente de algunos temas centrales de la Filosofía de la Ciencia. Nos centraremos en los elementos y el contexto en que tiene lugar un cambio racional de opinión como el que se produce en (...) un proceso de revolución científica. (shrink)
