You are, I am sure, just as aware as I am that the operational nodes of a complex problem, the points at which it can be split open to yield nuggets of new insight or achieve lasting advances, often lie in tediously technical details perhaps incomprehensible to all but specialists in the matter and anyways totally lacking in the romance and easy excitement which attract the topic's dilettantes. I would like you to hold fast to this appreciation, for the concerns (...) I shall raise here are technical indeed. They are, however,seminaltechnicalities which, as we seek to fathom them, should fundamentally reshape our comprehension of the logic of confirmation, causal connectedness, and the foundations of statistical inference. In brief, it will be seen that certain powerful everyday intuitions concerning which propositions are confirmationally irrelevant to which others are exceedingly difficult to justify. (shrink)

In the opening to his late essay, Der Gedanke, Frege asserts without qualification that the word "true" points the way for logic. But in a short piece from his Nachlass entitled "My Basic Logical Insights", Frege writes that the word true makes an unsuccessful attempt to point to the essence of logic, asserting instead that "what really pertains to logic lies not in the word "true" but in the assertoric force with which the sentence is uttered". Properly understanding what Frege (...) takes to be at issue here is crucial for understanding his conception of logic and, in particular, what he takes to be its normative status vis-à-vis judgement, assertion, and inference. In this paper, I focus my attention on clarifying the latter claim and Frege's motivations for making it, exposing what I take to be a fundamental tension in Frege's conception of logic. Finally, I discuss whether Frege's deployment of the horizontal in his mature Begriffsschrift helps to resolve this tension. (shrink)

It is widely agreed among philosophers of science today that no formal pattern can possibly be found in the origins of scientific theory. There is no such thing as a "logic of discovery," insists this view--a scientific hypothesis is susceptible to methodological critique only in its relation to empirical consequences derived after the hypothesis itself has emerged through a spontaneous creative inspiration. Yet confronted with the tautly directed thrust of theory-building as actually practiced at the cutting edge of scientific research, (...) this romantic denial of method in the genesis of ideas takes on the appearance of myth. It is the contention of this article that as empirical data ramify in logical complexity, they deposit a hard sediment of theory according to a standard inductive pattern so primitively compelling that it must be recognized as one of the primary forms of inferential thought. This process, here called "ontological induction," is a distillation out of unwieldly observed regularities of more conceptually tractable states hypothesized to underlie them, and is the wellspring of our beliefs in theoretical entities. Previous failure to recognize this pattern of induction has undoubtedly been in substantial measure a result of inadequate attention to the structural details of scientific propositions; for in order to exhibit the nature of ontological induction clearly, it is first necessary to make extended forays through sparsely explored methodological terrain--notably, the nature of scientific "variables," the logical form of "laws," and the type-hierarchy of scientific concepts. (shrink)

Efforts to bare the psychonomic nature of the semantic reference (representation) relation have been remarkably scanty; in fact, the only contemporary account developed with any care is the one proposed by Osgood. However, not even Osgood has looked deeply at the difficulties that beset any attempt to analyze reference in terms of common effects appropriately shared by a symbol and its significate.

Subjunctive conditionals have their uses, but constituting the meaning of dispositional predicates is not one of them. More germane is the analysis of dispositions in terms of "bases"--except that past efforts to maintain an ontic gap between dispositions and their bases, while not wholly misguided, have failed to appreciate the semantic birthright of dispositional concepts as a species of theoretical construct in primitive science.

When "Aristotle on Emotion" was first published it showed how discussion within Plato's Academy led to a better understanding of emotional response, and how that understanding influenced Aristotle's work in rhetoric, poetics, politics and ethics. The subject has been much discussed since then: there are numerous articles, anthologies and large portions of books on emotion and related topics. In a new epilogue to this second edition, W.W. Fortenbaugh takes account of points raised by other scholars and clarifies some of his (...) earlier thoughts, focusing on the central issue: how Aristotle conceived of emotional response. Among other matters, he considers laughter, emotion in relation to belief and appearance, the effect of emotion on judgement, and the involvement of pain and pleasure in emotional response. (shrink)

These essays present new analyses of the central figures of analytic philosophy -- Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Carnap -- from the beginnings of the analytic movement into the 1930s. The papers do not reflect a single perspective, but rather express divergent interpretations of this controversial intellectual milieu.

Like Kolodny, I think feminism one of the most vital and energizing forces in literary criticism today, but for two reasons I found her exposition of the topic disappointing. It seems to me that she underplays the most crucial of the many aesthetic and pedagogical issues raised by feminist literary study, and she endorses a kind of intellectual defeatism when, in the conclusion of her essay, she places a "Posted" sign between the male readers of Critical Inquiry and her own (...) area of work. Both flaws arise, it appears, out of her underestimation or understatement of the revolutionary implications of feminist literary study. On the other hand, both flaws may be evidence of her problem in writing for so general an audience, for in addressing a very heterogeneous audience about a topic so potentially incendiary, she has to confront the rhetorical problem of how to tell the truth and still be heard. It is that problem, I think, that may have led Kolodny and other feminists to propose an intellectual separatism of sorts as a necessary interlude. It seems to me that once the revolutionary implications of feminist literary study are understood, separatism can be seen to be one of the most damaging proposals one could make. William W. Morgan, associate professor of English at Illinois State University, is a contributor to Thomas Hardy: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him and has published essays on Hardy. He is presently working on a book on Hardy's poetry. This essay is a response to Annette Kolodny's "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary Criticism'". (shrink)

Part I is concerned with the tenet of modern Emperical Realism that while the theoretical concepts employed in science obtain their meanings entirely from the connections their usage establishes with the data language, the referents of such terms may be "unobservables," that is, entities which cannot be discussed within the data language alone. Such a view avoids both the restrictive excesses of logical positivism and the epistemic laxity of transcendentalism; however, it also necessitates a break with classical semantics, for it (...) follows from the empirical realistic position that a theoretical term must in principle be capable of simultaneously designating not just one entity, but indefinitely many. Drawing upon the Carnapian explication of "analytic truth," Part II examines a possible axiomatic basis for the empiricist theory of scientific meaningfulness to demonstrate that even if theoretical terms are able to designate entities inaccessible to the observation language, as held by Empirical Realism, so long as the meanings of theoretical terms derive from their connections with the observation language, the meaning content of a theory is exhausted by its observational consequences. (shrink)

Defends confrontational modes of citizenship as a means to reinvigorate democratic participation and regime accountability. A growing number of people are enraged about the quality and direction of public life, despise politicians, and are desperate for real political change. How can the contemporary neoliberal global political order be challenged and rebuilt in an egalitarian and humanitarian manner? What type of political agency and new political institutions are needed for this? In order to answer these questions, Confrontational Citizenship draws on a (...) broad base of perspectives to articulate the concept of confrontational citizenship. William W. Sokoloff defends extra-institutional and confrontational modes of political activity along with new ways of conceiving political institutions as a way to create political orders accountable to the people. In contrast to many forms of democratic theory, Sokoloff argues that confrontational modes of citizenship (e.g., protest) are good because they increase the accountability of a regime to the people, increase the legitimacy of regimes, lead to improvements in a political order, and serve as a means to vent frustration. The goal is to make the word citizen relevant and dangerous to the settled and closed practices that structure our political world and to provide a hopeful vision of what it means to be politically progressive today. William W. Sokoloff is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. (shrink)

These essays present new analyzes of the central figures of analytic philosophy -- Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Carnap -- from the beginnings of the analytic movement into the 1930s. The papers do not reflect a single perspective, but rather express divergent interpretations of this controversial intellectual milieu.

Designed to provide scientific personnel, policymakers, and the public with a succinct summary of the public aspects of scientific issues, this book focuses on how values and science intersect and how social values can be brought to bear on complex technical enterprises. Themes examined include: (1) relation of science and technology to human values (citing ways science and technology influence social philosophies); (2) changing sociotechnical milieu (describing recent trends toward politicization in technical endeavors); (3) complexion of science and social sciences (...) (surveying the attributes of the social sciences); (4) professionalism and responsibility (exploring the need for stewardship); (5) architectonics of technical trust (examining the interlocking elements of technical trust and focusing on the recombinant DNA controversy); (6) societal guidance of inquiry and application (discussing the possibilities and limits of scientific freedom); (7) systematic assessment for decision making (offering suggestions for dealing with fact/value distinctions); (8) social values and ethics (examining the role of values in decision making); (9) science and technology in the polis (reviewing ways of managing and reducing undue polarization in sociotechnical disputes); and (10) stewardship (suggesting needs and opportunities for exercising technical responsibility). An extensive bibliography is provided. (ML). (shrink)

It has become customary in modern behavioristics to speak of stimuli as though they elicit responses from organisms. But logically this is absurd, for analysis of the grammatical roles of stimulus and response concepts shows that stimuli and responses differ in logical type from causes and effects. The "S elicits R" formula thus stands revealed as elliptical for a more complicated form of assertion. The trouble with this ellipsis, however, is that by suppressing vital components of formal structure in behavioral (...) principles, it has led to gratuitous assumptions about the environmental antecedents of behavior and seriously undermined the ability of behavior theory to assimilate the "higher mental processes.". (shrink)

In her influential paper, ‘The First Person,’ Elizabeth Anscombe brings together a number of considerations which, she believes, lead to the startling conclusion that the first person pronoun is not a referring expression — that ‘I’ is never used to refer. This is startling, because if we consider even superficially the logical properties of first person statements, nothing could, prima facie, seem more obvious than that in any such statement, the first person pronoun functions logically as a singular referring expression. (...) Moreover, Anscombe herself offers the following informal gloss on the truth conditions of first person assertions: ‘If X asserts something with ‘I’ as subject, his assertion will be true if and only if what he asserts is true of X.’. (shrink)

This edition of volume 1 in the series Rutgers University Studies in Classical Humanities concerns Hellenistic ethics.

When Hempel's "paradox of confirmation" is developed within the confines of conditional probability theory, it becomes apparent that two seemingly equivalent generalities ("laws") can have exactly the same class of observational refuters even when their respective classes of confirming observations are importantly distinct. Generalities which have the inductive supports we commonsensically construe them to have, however, must incorporate quasi-logical operators or connectives which cannot be defined truth-functionally. The origins and applications of these "modalic" concepts appear to be intimately linked with (...) a number of basic conundrums in the philosophy of science, such as causation and the nature of explanation. (shrink)