When historians of philosophy turn to the work of distinguished philosopher Frederick L. Will, Pragmatism and Realism will be an important part of the ...

Accompanying the decline of empiricism in the theory of knowledge has been an increased interest in the social determinants of knowledge and an increased recognition of the fundamental place in the constitution of knowledge occupied by accepted cognitive practices. The principal aim of this paper is to show how a view of knowledge that fully recognizes the role of these practices can adequately treat a topic that is widely considered to be an insuperable obstacle to such a view. The topic (...) is that of scientific realism, of the independence with respect to cognitive practices of certain objects of knowledge. (shrink)

In this collection of nine essays, Will demonstrates that a social account of human knowledge is consistent with, and ultimately requires, realism.

Introduction The central aim of this book is to focus attention upon and illuminate the character of a certain phase of philosophical reflection: namely, ...

This essay explores the nature and neurological basis of creativity in technical production. After presenting a model of expert technical cognition based in cognitive anthropology and cognitive psychology, the authors propose that craft production has three inherent sources of novelty — procedural drift, serendipitous error and fiddling. However, these are quite limited in their creative potential, which may help explain the virtual absence of innovation over the long millennia of the Palaeolithic. Innovation can be far more rapid and effective via (...) invention, which requires folk theories of causation and adequate working memory capacity, all fairly recent evolutionary developments. The neurological basis of expert technical cognition lies in well-known cortical and sub-cortical structures, but recent research has established a provocative role for the cerebellum in the formulation of novel arrangements. (shrink)

The task of the philosophy of science, according to Churchman, is twofold. It is, one, “to determine the ideal of science by scientific methods,” and, the other, “to describe the manner in which science can most efficiently approach its ideals”. The primary purpose of this book on experimental inference is to deal with these two subjects as they bear upon what is commonly called material or empirical science, rather than upon formal or analytic science, though it is recognized that no (...) absolute separation can be made between these two different types of science, or between the performance of the above tasks in connection with each. The kind of science, then, whose objective and methods are to be elucidated is the kind in which in some broad sense of these terms decisions are necessarily made on the basis of empirical observation and testing. Some observation or series of observations is made, and it is the task of the scientist to make an inference based upon these observational data. What is his aim in doing this, and what are the most efficient ways in which he can proceed? (shrink)

The contention of the above comment, as I understand it, is that there is, analogously to the problem of trisecting an arbitrary angle in mathematics, a sound demonstration, along the lines employed by Hume and Russell, of skeptical conclusions concerning our inductive knowledge of the future, and that hence one is mistaken in imputing to that argument, as I have done, a logical slip arising from a confusion in the use of ‘future’ and other similar words. I am indebted to (...) Mr. Wang for the stimulation, and to the Editor of Philosophy of Science for the opportunity, to try to make my points clearer.The proponents of these skeptical arguments maintain that, apart from some supporting postulates which we must make in inductions about the future, we have no evidence concerning the future of any given moment. If we restrict ourselves to the evidence we have from the present and the past, and do not bolster this evidence with some Principle of Induction, like that of Hume to the effect that the future will be like the past, “we have no theoretical assurance,” as Mr. Wang puts it, “that the practice of guiding our activities by what we learn from... [the past] will lead to success on the whole and in the long run.”. (shrink)

For some time there have been appearing in the philosophical literature hints and suggestions that the so-called “problem of the external world” should be abandoned, not primarily because it is of little pragmatic significance, but rather because there is really no such problem to be solved. The publication of Reichenbach's Experience and Prediction has now stimulated a resurgence of these suggestions. In the course of his discussion of the book in the April Philosophy of Science Professor Ernest Nagel has taken (...) occasion to argue briefly that this problem, which Reichenbach attempts to solve, cannot even be stated unless one assumes its solution. And in a similar vein more recently Dr. William Barrett has also criticized Reichenbach and has then gone on to present certain fundamental logical considerations which, it is alleged, guarantee that the expression “Is there an external world?” cannot designate a legitimate philosophical problem. The situation, as he describes it, is as follows. The sentence “There is an external world” or the equivalent sentence “There is a physical object” can be confirmed in a physicalistic language only if one assumes the existence of certain physical objects. This procedure is of course circular. These sentences cannot therefore be confirmed, and, since the verifiability theory of meaning is accepted, the questions derived by transferring them into the interrogative mood cannot be meaningfully asked. A similar result is asserted to follow if one employs a perception language for science in place of a physicalistic language, since there is a parallelism between these two languages such that for every expression in the one there will be a corresponding expression in the other. (shrink)