Besides the observable properties it exhibits and the actual processes it undergoes, a thing is full of threats and promises. The dispositions or capacities of a thing — its flexibility, its inflammability, its solubility — are no less important to us than its overt behaviour, but they strike us by comparison as rather ethereal. And so we are moved to inquire whether we can bring them down to earth; whether, that is, we can explain disposition terms without any reference to (...) occult powers. (shrink)

Besides the observable properties it exhibits and the actual processes it undergoes, a thing is full of threats and promises. The dispositions or capacities of a thing — its flexibility, its inflammability, its solubility — are no less important to us than its overt behaviour, but they strike us by comparison as rather ethereal. And so we are moved to inquire whether we can bring them down to earth; whether, that is, we can explain disposition terms without any reference to (...) occult powers. (shrink)

Astroparticle physics is an interdisciplinary field embracing astronomy, astrophysics and particle physics. In a recent paper on this topic, Brigitte Falkenburg defended that only scientific realism can make sense of it and that realist beliefs constitute an indispensable methodological principle of research in this discipline. The aim of this work is to show that there exists an anti-realist alternative to this account, along the lines of what Bas van Fraassen showed in his famous book The Scientific Image. Problems and (...) results of astroparticle physics can be understood from an empiricist point of view too, namely that of van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, which is a more modest and metaphysics-free alternative to scientific realism. Although constructive empiricism can make sense of science no worse than scientific realism does, van Fraassen’s goal is not to demonstrate that his stance is the only viable position, but just that it is not incoherent or proven false by his opponents. In this paper it will be shown that the constructive empiricist stance constitutes a legitimate alternative to scientific realism even when it gets to astroparticle physics and that it does indeed make sense of this new discipline, pace Falkenburg. (shrink)

Any philosophy of science ought to have something to say about the nature of mathematics, especially an account like constructive empiricism in which mathematical concepts like model and isomorphism play a central role. This thesis is a contribution to the larger project of formulating a constructive empiricist account of mathematics. The philosophy of mathematics developed is fictionalist, with an anti-realist metaphysics. In the thesis, van Fraassen's constructive empiricism is defended and various accounts of mathematics are considered and (...) rejected. Constructive empiricism cannot be realist about abstract objects; it must reject even the realism advocated by otherwise ontologically restrained and epistemologically empiricist indispensability theorists. Indispensability arguments rely on the kind of inference to the best explanation the rejection of which is definitive of constructive empiricism. On the other hand, formalist and logicist anti-realist positions are also shown to be untenable. It is argued that a constructive empiricist philosophy of mathematics must be fictionalist. Borrowing and developing elements from both Philip Kitcher's constructive naturalism and Kendall Walton's theory of fiction, the account of mathematics advanced treats mathematics as a collection of stories told about an ideal agent and mathematical objects as fictions. The account explains what true portions of mathematics are about and why mathematics is useful, even while it is a story about an ideal agent operating in an ideal world; it connects theory and practice in mathematics with human experience of the phenomenal world. At the same time, the make-believe and game-playing aspects of the theory show how we can make sense of mathematics as fiction, as stories, without either undermining that explanation or being forced to accept abstract mathematical objects into our ontology. All of this occurs within the framework that constructive empiricism itself provides the epistemological limitations it mandates, the semantic view of theories, and an emphasis on the pragmatic dimension of our theories, our explanations, and of our relation to the language we use. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers have discussed the prospects for assessing values empirically, particularly given the ongoing threat of sexism and other oppressive values influencing science and society. Some advocates of such tests now champion a “values as evidence” approach, and they criticize Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism for not holding values to the same level of empirical scrutiny as other claims. In this paper, we defend contextual empiricism by arguing that many of these criticisms are based on mischaracterizations of Longino’s position, overstatements of (...) certain claims, and false dichotomies. Her contextual empiricism not only allows for the empirical support and disconfirmation of values, but Longino explicitly discusses when values can be empirically adjudicated and emphasizes the crucial role of the community for standards of evidence. We support contextual empiricism and elaborate a less direct account of “values as heuristics” by reviewing Longino’s theory of evidence and then using a case study from Elisabeth Lloyd on the biology of female orgasm, demonstrating the disconfirmation of androcentric values in evolutionary science. Within Longino’s and Lloyd’s contextual empiricism, values do not get treated as empirical evidence to be directly assessed by individuals, but rather values are heuristic tools to build models whose use can be validated or invalidated by communities based on their empirical fruitfulness in the logic and pragmatics of research questions in specific historical and cultural contexts. (shrink)

Accounting for our knowledge of de re modalities is probably the main reason why the proponents of modal empiricism think that their view should be preferred to modal rationalism. In this paper, I address Sonia Roca-Royes' account, which is taken to be a representative modal empiricist view, in order to show that modal empiricism faces serious problems even in explaining our knowledge of possibility de re, something which seems to be the easiest thing to explain on this view. (...) I argue that Roca-Royes' account does not prove what she claims it does, that it can hardly be articulated in a non-redundant way, and that her account of our knowledge of possibility de re can hardly be reconciled with the essentiality of origin principle, to which modal empiricists sometimes appeal while criticizing the modal rationalist account. (shrink)

Abstract Kitcher (1989) and others have criticized Salmon's (1984) causal account of explanation on the grounds that it is epistemologically inadequate. The difficulty is that Salmon's principle of ?mark transmission? fails to achieve its intended purpose, namely to distinguish causal processes from other types of processes. This renders Salmon's account of causality epistemically inaccessible. In this paper that critique is reviewed and developed, and a modification to Salmon's theory, the ?conserved?quantity? theory (Dowe, 1992) is presented. This theory is (...) shown to avoid the epistemologicalproblem, by replacing mark transmission with the ascription of conserved quantities such as energy. The virtue of this approach is that it renders causality epistemically accessible. This constitutes a defence of the causal theory of explanation. (shrink)

Hume's regularity theory of causation was partly motivated by a criticism of Descartes' causal account of collisions. According to Descartes, bodies are things with extension, and since having extension does not entail any ability to cause changes of motion in other bodies, such changes must be explained by attributing a ‘causal power’ to bodies, logically independent of their extension. Hume's point is that we can't observe any such causal power and we should not use ideas about such unobserved qualities (...) of bodies. Given his form of empiricism, the regularity theory is the only choice; causation is no more than constant correlation. However, there is a third option beside attributing a metaphysical ‘causal power’ and mere regularity; if we follow Newton and say that bodies are characterised and individuated by their mass, not their extension, we can give another analysis of causal interaction between bodies. It is by having mass a body can cause changes in the motion of other bodies. Thus, using classical mechanics we can give an alternative to Hume's regularity theory of causation in which the necessary connection between cause and effect is understood as a conceptual connection between certain descriptions of cause and effect. It does not satisfy Hume's strictures on concept formation, but no additional metaphysics is necessary. In a sense it is an intermediate position between Humean regularity and an account in terms of metaphysical necessity. (shrink)

Penelope Maddy's original solution to the dilemma posed by Benacerraf in his 'Mathematical Truth' was to reconcile mathematical empiricism with mathematical realism by arguing that we can perceive realistically construed sets. Though her hypothesis has attracted considerable critical attention, much of it, in my view, misses the point. In this paper I vigorously defend Maddy's account against published criticisms, not because I think it is true, but because these criticisms have functioned to obscure a more fundamental issue that is (...) well worth addressing: in general -- and not only in the mathematical domain -- empiricism and realism simply cannot be reconciled by means of an account of perception anything like Maddy's. But because Maddy's account of perception is so plausible, this conclusion raises the specter of the broader incompatibility of realism and empiricism, which contemporary philosophers are frequently at pains to forget. (shrink)

Hume's empirical approach seems to drain the concept of causality of all content, so that causality in objects is reduced to constant conjunction. His use of language of causality, which is necessarily realist, is undermined by his account of causality, which is not realist. The realist intepretation of Hume, by philosophers such as Galen Strawson, is rejected because it is incompatible with empiricism. However, if Hume's view that we do not have any sensory experience of causing is challenged, then (...) the way is open to give an account of causality which is both empiricist and realist. (shrink)

According to H.O. Mounce, James's pragmatism is a failure simply for being inconsistent with that of C.S. Peirce. Mounce also dismisses James's radical empiricism as involving phenomenalism. There are significant inaccuracies with such a view of James, and, accordingly, this paper is a response to Mounce. The two themes of radical empiricism and pragmatism constitute the heart of William James's philosophical project, and at least for this reason alone I think it important to correct Mounce. In short, his indictment of (...) James for having paved the way for the Richard Rortys of our community both fails to sufficiently engage James on his own terms and fails to present pragmatism in a sufficiently pragmatic manner. (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall (...) not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2, in Locke 1975; which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Essay, I.i.6). There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as David Hartley saw and Denis Diderot proclaimed more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong: see Armstrong 1968 and 1978.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century (Locke) to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

This book offers a novel account of the relationship of experience to knowledge. The account builds on the intuitive idea that our ordinary perceptual judgments are not autonomous, that an interdependence obtains between our view of the world and our perceptual judgments. Anil Gupta shows in this important study that this interdependence is the key to a satisfactory account of experience. He uses tools from logic and the philosophy of language to argue that his account of (...) experience makes available an attractive and feasible empiricism. (shrink)

Kant contends that necessity is a criterion of the a priori—that is, that all knowledge of necessary propositions is a priori. This contention, together with two others that Kant took to be evident—we know some mathematical propositions and such propositions are necessary—leads directly to the conclusion that some knowledge is a priori. Although many contemporary philosophers endorse Kant’s criterion, supporting arguments are hard to come by. Gordon Barnes provides one of the few examples. My purpose in this chapter is to (...) articulate and examine his argument. I have two goals in doing so. The first is to uncover several significant gaps in the argument. The second is to show that it suffers from a common defect in rationalist arguments. If the argument were successful against empiricist accounts of modal knowledge, it would apply with equal force to extant rationalist accounts of such knowledge. Hence, the cost of refuting modal empiricism is modal scepticism. (shrink)

This paper traces the ancestry of a familiar historiographical narrative, according to which early modern philosophy was marked by the development of empiricism, rationalism, and their synthesis by Immanuel Kant. It is often claimed that this narrative became standard in the nineteenth century, due to the influence of Thomas Reid, Kant and his disciples, or German Hegelians and British Idealists. The paper argues that the narrative became standard only at the turn of the twentieth century. This was not due to (...) the influence of Reid, German Hegelians, or British Idealists as they did not endorse the narrative, although Thomas Hill Green may have facilitated its uptake. The narrative is based on Kant’s historiographical sketches, as corrected and integrated by Karl Leonhard Reinhold. It was first fleshed out into full-fledged histories by two Kantians, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann and Johann Gottlieb Buhle. Numerous historians, several of whom were not Kantians, spread it in the English-speaking world. They include Kuno Fischer, Friedrich Ueberweg, Richard Falckenberg, and Wilhelm Windelband. However, the wide availability of their works did not suffice to make the narrative standard because, until the 1890s, the Hegelian account was at least as popular as theirs. Among the factors that allowed the narrative to become standard are its aptness to be adopted by philosophers of the most diverse persuasions, its simplicity and suitability for teaching. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an empiricist account of modality that keeps a substantive account of modal commitment, but throws out the metaphysics. I suggest that if we pair a deflationary attitude toward representation with a substantive account of how scientific models are constructed and put to use, the result is an account that deflates the metaphysics of modal commitment without deflating the content of modal claims.

The issue of time-awareness presents a critical challenge for empiricism: if temporal properties are not directly perceived, how do we become aware of them? A unique empiricist account of time-awareness suggested by Hume's comments on time in the Treatise avoids the problems characteristic of other empiricist accounts. Hume's theory, however, has some counter-intuitive consequences. The failure of empiricists to come up with a defensible theory of time-awareness lends prima facie support to a non-empiricist theory of ideas.

This book presents a thoroughly empiricist account of physics. By providing an overview of the development of empiricism from Ockham to van Fraassen the book lays the foundation for its own version of empiricism. Empiricism for the author consists of three ideas: nominalism, i.e. dismissing second order quantification as unnecessary, epistemological naturalism, and viewing classification of things in natural kinds as a human habit not in need for any justification. The book offers views on the realism-antirealism debate as (...) well as on the individuation of theories as a thoroughly neglected aspect of underdetermination. The book next discusses a broad range of topics, including the predicates body, spatial distance and time interval, the ontology of electromagnetism, propensities, the measurement problem and other philosophical issues in quantum theory. Discussions about the direction of time and about string theory make up the final part of the book. (shrink)

A radically new philosophy of experience and speculation, based on a reading of Whitehead's Process and Reality. Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with a method of systematic cosmological speculation? Didier Debaise's reading of Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy that makes this possible looks like, how it works and what is at stake. He focuses in on Whitehead's (...) attempt to construct a metaphysical system of everything in the universe that exists whilst simultaneously claiming that it can account for every element of our experience: everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt by Tim MilnesMargaret WatkinsTim Milnes. The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 278. Hardback. ISBN: 9780198812739. $91.00.In his brief autobiography, “My Own Life,” Hume reports that “almost all [his] life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (E-MOL: xxxi). This is one (...) of at least ten places in this brief work in which he associates himself with “letters” or “literature”—as compared to at most four associations with philosophy. The moral to be inferred is not that Hume considered himself not to be a philosopher. Rather, he conceived of philosophy as a kind of literature. The Treatise was itself a “literary attempt.” Indeed, opposition between the “literary” and “philosophical” aspects of a text would have been foreign to Hume and his contemporaries—a notion for a later age, despite his occasional loose distinction between the relevant genres, as in his list of writings “historical, philosophical, or literary” in “My Own Life” (E-MOL: xxxvi).Yet despite Hume’s own understanding of the continuity between philosophy and literature, broadly conceived, it is still common for contemporary philosophers to ignore literary questions in their examination of Hume’s work, or to presume that one can easily distinguish the “philosophical” parts from the “literary” ones. Tim Milnes’s The Testimony of Sense is therefore a welcome addition to the Hume literature (pun intended). With a particular focus on the essay—a genre of great importance to Hume—Milnes contributes to the small set of engagements with Hume from the disciplinary perspective of English literature. With training in both philosophy and literature, as well as established expertise on Romanticism and its own essays, Milnes is well-qualified for the task. The Testimony of Sense includes sustained engagement with Hume’s contemporaries and successors, but for the purposes of this review, I engage the book primarily as a Hume scholar for Hume scholars.Milnes’s story plays out in three acts. The first establishes the need for public trust created by a skeptical crisis, itself a product of Hume’s criticism of the epistemic program of thinkers in the Cartesian and Lockean traditions. The second explains how the essays of the long eighteenth century constitute a response to that need in various ways. The third reveals in detail how the Romantic essayists, particularly William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, both respond to and deviate from the “neoclassical” essayists, typified by Hume and Samuel Johnson.The first chapter, “Self and Intersubjectivity,” lays the groundwork by articulating how Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart identify the need for what we now call intersubjectivity. Milnes describes the common thread as a kind of “natural transcendentalism.” In what sense are these thinkers properly understood as [End Page 175] transcendentalists? The central idea seems to be that all posit things other than reason as “conditions of meaningful thought” (72). For Hume, it is the social, linguistic experience of a community of virtuous judges. The intricate relations between self and other essential to such a community get “internalized within the specular drama of the impartial spectator” (72) in Smith’s writing, which itself takes part in the drama through his “halting, qualified syntax” that mimics “everyday speech” (44). Reid posits a “prescience” of trust, which grounds our reliance on both human testimony and the uniformity of nature, itself undergirded by the design of a benevolent God. Stewart, who posits axiomatic truths that help constitute the “stamina of intellect,” goes furthest, actually calling these truths transcendental (55). This chapter also puts these eighteenth-century thinkers in conversation with twentieth-century theorists, including Habermas, Davidson, and Rorty.Chapter 2, “The Subject of Trust,” deepens the analysis by situating these “natural transcendentalisms” in the broader enlightenment context. In contrast to Descartes, Bacon, and Locke, who were suspicious of our reliance on the opinions of others, the eighteenth-century thinkers understand trust as prior to reason in various ways—though not prior to solidarity. The particulars in each case depend on their responses to skepticism and their accounts of the relation between... (shrink)

In this article, I put forward a basic philosophical claim: empirical scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge generated in experimental and observational practices, presupposes real causation. My discussion exploits two core notions from the philosophical analysis of scientific experimentation and observation: the aim of realizing object-apparatus correlations and the required control of the relevant interactions between environment and experimental or observational system. The conclusion is that, without the notion of real causation, acquiring epistemically sound empirical knowledge is impossible. Several empiricist (...) objections to this conclusion are discussed and refuted. As a consequence, empiricism faces an unsolvable dilemma: either it cannot account for empirical knowledge or it should accept the existence of unobservable but real causal interactions. (shrink)

This paper considers George A. Reisch’s account of the role of Cold War political forces in shaping the apolitical stance that came to dominate philosophy of science in the late 1940s and 1950s. It argues that at least as early as the 1930s, Logical Empiricists such as Rudolf Carnap already held that philosophy of science could not properly have political aims, and further suggests that political forces alone cannot explain this view’s rise to dominance during the Cold War, since (...) political forces cannot explain why a philosophy of science with liberal democratic, anti-communist aims did not flourish. The paper then argues that if professionalization is understood in the right way, it might point toward an explanation of the apolitical stance of Cold War philosophy of science. (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)

For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the (...) traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations. (shrink)

Computational methods such as computer simulations, Monte Carlo methods, and agent-based modeling have become the dominant techniques in many areas of science. Extending Ourselves contains the first systematic philosophical account of these new methods, and how they require a different approach to scientific method. Paul Humphreys draws a parallel between the ways in which such computational methods have enhanced our abilities to mathematically model the world, and the more familiar ways in which scientific instruments have expanded our access to (...) the empirical world. This expansion forms the basis for a new kind of empiricism, better suited to the needs of science than the older anthropocentric forms of empiricism. Human abilities are no longer the ultimate standard of epistemological correctness.Humphreys also includes arguments for the primacy of properties rather than objects, the need to consider technological constraints when appraising scientific methods, and a detailed account of how the path from computational template to scientific application is constructed. This last feature allows us to hold a form of selective realism in which anti-realist arguments based on formal reconstructions of theories can be avoided. One important consequence of the rise of computational methods is that the traditional organization of the sciences is being replaced by an organization founded on computational templates.Extending Ourselves will be of interest to philosophers of science, epistemologists, and to anyone interested in the role played by computers in modern science. (shrink)

Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from their environment. They notably avoided separating perception of the material environment from social life. This perspective on perceptual experience was to prove the inspiration for Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual psychology. Gibson provided a theory of how the direct perception of the organism-environment relation is possible. Central to his account was the notion of (...) a medium for direct perception. However Gibson provided two mutually inconsistent accounts of the medium leading to problems for his radical empiricism. We develop an account of the medium that does justice to ecological psychology’s radical empiricist roots. To complement this account of the medium we detail a usage-based account of information. Together they allow us to propose a novel radical empiricist view of direct perception. We then return to the notion of medium and expand it to include sociomaterial practices. We show how direct perception happens in the midst of social life, and is made possible by an active achieving and maintaining of a pragmatic relation with the environment. (shrink)

Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge has a strictly observational basis. Rationalism is the doctrine that least some knowledge has non-observational, purely conceptual basis. In the present work, empiricism is carefully considered and found to have four dire shortcomings: -/- (1) Empiricism cannot account for our knowledge of what doesn't exist, let alone what cannot exist. -/- (2) Empiricism cannot account for our knowledge of dependence-relations, given (1), coupled with the fact that 'P depends on Q' is (...) equivalent with 'not-Q either necessitates or is dispositive of not-P.' -/- (3) Empiricism cannot account for our knowledge of the past, the future, or the possible, given (2), coupled with the fact knowledge of any of these domains requires knowledge of conditional truths (truths of the form "if P, then Q") and therefore of dependence-relations. -/- (4) Empiricism cannot by itself apprise us of any truths, given (3), coupled with the fact that knowledge of conditional truths is necessary to recognize the truths implicit in any body of sensory data. -/- The arguments of key empiricists are closely examined. Special attention is paid to George Berkeley's arguments for idealism ('to be is to be perceive/conceived'). It is shown that, although Berkeley's arguments fail, profound insights are embedded in the very sophisms that vitiate those same arguments, the three most important ones being: -/- (i) That data-modelling and truth-identification at least sometimes coalesce, -/- (ii) That scientific theories are at least sometimes capable of being represented as interpreted formal calculi, and -/- (iii) That when theoretical terms are defined contextually, as opposed to directly, otherwise unintelligible assertions acquire scientific significance. -/- Further, it is shown that, even though Berkeley's arguments for idealism fall through, he himself deserves credit for identifying the principle in terms of which the fallacies in those arguments are to be understood, namely: -/- (*) It is not sensory experience alone that yields awareness of the outside world, but sensory experience coupled with awareness on the subject's part of relational invariances holding among the objects of those awareness. -/- Thus, perceptual knowledge is knowledge of invariances. And, to make a point hinted at in Berkeley's work, knowledge of laws is meta-perceptual knowledge, given that laws of nature are invariances holding among the invariances holding among the objects of perception. (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)

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)

Constructive empiricists claim to offer a reconstruction of the aim and practice of science without adopting all the metaphysical commitments of scientific realism. Deflationists about truth boast of the ability to offer a full account of the nature of truth without adopting the metaphysical commitments accompanying substantive accounts. Though the two views would form an attractive package, I argue that the pairing is not possible: constructive empiricism requires a substantive account of truth. I articulate what sort of (...) class='Hi'>account of truth and empirical adequacy the constructive empiricist must offer and then show why deflationists cannot uphold such an account. (shrink)

This book proposes a novel position in the debate on scientific realism: Modal Empiricism. Modal empiricism is the view that the aim of science is to provide theories that correctly delimit, in a unified way, the range of experiences that are naturally possible given our position in the world. The view is associated with a pragmatic account of scientific representation and an original notion of situated modalities, together with an inductive epistemology for modalities. It purports to provide a faithful (...) account of scientific practice and of its impressive achievements, and defuses the main motivations for scientific realism. More generally, Modal Empiricism purports to be the precise articulation of a pragmatist stance towards science. This book is of interest to any philosopher involved in the debate on scientific realism, or interested in how to properly understand the content, aim and achievements of science. (shrink)

Generative grammarians typically advocate for a rationalist understanding of language acquisition, according to which the structure of a developed language faculty reflects innate guidance rather than environmental influence. This proposal is developed in developmental linguistics by triggering models of language acquisition. Opposing this tradition, various theorists have advocated for empiricist views of language acquisition, according to which the structure of a developed linguistic competence reflects the linguistic environment in which this competence developed. On this picture, linguistic development is accounted (...) for by general statistical learning mechanisms. In this article I shall precisify the debate, provide a clearer picture of what is at stake, and show why an intermediate picture is needed. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the Epistemic Challenge for mind-independent accounts of modality. The challenge can be formulated as an inconsistency problem among three premises and, therefore, any strategy to meet the challenge will require the negation of (at least) one of its premises. The aim of the paper is not to offer a positive solution to the challenge, but rather to argue for the claim that to follow a hybrid strategy is probably the best way to meet it. With some (...) qualifications, reasons are given as to why empiricism should be the way to meet the challenge as far as de re modality is concerned, whereas rationalism might be the correct way of addressing it for the case of de dicto modality. (shrink)

I analyse critically what I regard as the most accomplished empiricist account of propensities, namely the long run propensity theory developed by Donald Gillies . Empiricist accounts are distinguished by their commitment to the ‘identity thesis’: the identification of propensities and objective probabilities. These theories are intended, in the tradition of Karl Popper’s influential proposal, to provide an interpretation of probability that renders probability statements directly testable by experiment. I argue that the commitment to the identity thesis (...) leaves empiricist theories, including Gillies’ version, vulnerable to a variant of what is known as Humphreys’ paradox. I suggest that the tension may be resolved only by abandoning the identity thesis, and by adopting instead an understanding of propensities as explanatory properties of chancy objects. (shrink)

Current developments in feminist epistemology stem from the recognition that knowledge is socially constructed and therefore, must be seen in the context of the social relations in which its production occurs. This version of epistemology stresses the view that individual experiences and knowledge claims are possible only within a community.The concern of this paper is to examine the empiricist account of knowledge. It questions the adequacy of the empiricist attempt to base knowledge on perceptual experience, pointing out (...) that experience has a wider focus than what empiricists allow.Feminist epistemology takes off as a critique of empiricist epistemology on the grounds that the empiricist conception of knowledge fails to acknowledge the fact that knowledge operates in sociohistorical contexts. This accounts for a major limitation in the empiricist conception of knowledge. In order to underscore the thesis of feminist epistemology, the Yoruba women's experience is used, drawing on such factors as women's reproductive experiences and how these experiences can bear upon epistemological inquiry. (shrink)

Introduction: The empiricists and their context -- Empiricism and the empiricists -- The intellectual background to the early modern empiricists -- Martin Luther and the Reformation -- Aristotelian cosmology and the scientific revolution -- Aristotelian/scholastic hylomorphism and the rise of mechanism -- The Royal Society of London -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626) -- The natural realm : the idols of the mind -- Idols of the tribe -- Idols of the cave -- Idols of the marketplace -- Idols of the theatre (...) -- Knowledge and experience : induction introduced -- Aristotelian/scholastic syllogisms : deductions dismissed -- Baconian empiricism : induction introduced -- Conclusion: Bacon the empiricist -- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) -- The natural realm : Hobbes's materialistic mechanism -- The importance of motion -- Sensation and the mind -- Knowledge and experience : definitions and the euclidean method -- Two kinds of knowledge and proper ratiocination -- The method of analysis and the method of synthesis -- Conclusion: Hobbes, the empiricist -- Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) -- The natural realm : Gassendi's atomism -- The basic principles of Gassendi's atomism -- Atomistic sensation -- Knowledge and experience : the middle way to knowledge -- The sceptics are partly correct -- Knowledge regained? -- Conclusion: Gassendi. the empiricist -- Robert Boyle (1627-1691) -- The natural realm : Boyle's mechanism (corpuscularianism) -- The basic principles of Boyle's mechanism (or corpscularianism) -- Sensation and the mind -- Knowledge and experience : mechanism and the cautious experimenter -- The excellency of mechanism -- Experimentation and the status of mechanism -- Conclusion: Boyle, the empiricist -- John Locke (1632-1704) -- The natural realm : Locke's mechanism -- Against innatism -- Ideas and the tabula rasa -- Primary and secondary qualities, and our confused idea of substance -- Locke on power -- Knowledge and experience : Locke's epistemology -- Indirect realism, or the representational theory of perception -- The certainty of knowledge -- The origin of knowledge -- The extent of knowledge -- Conclusion: Locke, the empiricist -- Isaac Newton (1642-1727) -- The natural realm : Newton's principia -- A world of forces : universal gravitation -- What kind of quality is gravity? -- Mechanism and action at a distance -- Knowledge and experience : rules for the study of natural philosophy -- The four rules -- Whither natural philosophy -- Conclusion: Newton, the empiricist -- George Berkeley (1685-1753) -- The natural realm : Berkeley's idealism -- The world contains only souls and ideas -- Esse est percipi : two arguments for idealism/immaterialism -- Against the primary/secondary quality distinction -- Knowledge and experience : Berkeley's common sense epistemology -- Against the representational theory of perception -- Defeating the skeptic, and returning to common sense -- Mechanism, newtonianism, and instrumentalism : Berkeley on the new science -- Responses to popular objections -- Conclusion: Berkeley, the empiricist -- David Hume (1711-1776) -- The natural realm : Hume's psychological approach -- Ideas and impressions -- The principles of association -- Knowledge and experience : Hume's semi-scepticism -- Relations of ideas vs. matters of fact -- From matters of fact to cause and effect : Hume's first question -- Knowledge of cause and effect : Hume's second question -- The problem of induction : Hume's third question -- Hume's positive account of causation : induction regained -- Conclusion: Hume, the empiricist -- Empiricism and the empiricists : summary and conclusion. (shrink)

One might expect that empiricists would be hostile to religion. Religions are customarily based on belief in an occult realm, a realm of gods, spirits, demons, and mysterious forces. This realm is inaccessible to sense perception, which empiricists regard as our only source of knowledge. One can, however, distinguish between empiricism as a doctrine and empiricism as a stance. A liberal kind of doctrinal empiricism will allow for inferences to unobservable entities, which may also fall within the scope of empiricism (...) as a stance. Inferences to the existence of God would be of this kind, although they are unlikely to attain the standards expected in the sciences. Those who reject inferences to unobservable entities, on the other hand, will reject some (but not necessarily all) forms of “natural theology.” Empiricist assessments of religious claims will need to take into account two further facts: firstly, that they form “webs of belief” and, secondly, that they are often thought to be based on a distinct source of knowledge, namely the act of faith. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a unified account of scientific and mathematical change in a thoroughly empiricist setting. After providing a formal modelling in terms of embedding, and criticising it for being too restrictive, a second modelling is advanced. It generalises the first, providing a more open-ended pattern of theory development, and is articulated in terms of da Costa and French's partial structures approach. The crucial component of scientific and mathematical change is spelled out in (...) terms of partial embeddings. Finally, an application of this second pattern is made, with the examination of the early formulation of set theory. (shrink)

Much feminist philosophy of science has been developed as a reaction against logical empiricism and the associated view that social factors play no role in good science. Recent accounts of the Vienna Circle that highlighted the ways in which some of its members attempted to combine their empiricism with emancipatory politics are used here as a basis on which to reassess the relationship between logical empiricism and feminism. The focus is chiefly on Otto Neurath.

A picture has indeed held modern Western philosophy captive, that of the universe as a vast machine whose iron laws are best understood as exceptionless empirical regularities which, as it were, determine the future before it happens. This fantastic conception commands the assent, not just of positivistically-minded naturalists but of all the great anti-naturalists who champion a very different view of human action as a domain of freedom ¿that somehow cheats science¿. The most fundamental move in Roy Bhaskar¿s system of (...) philosophy, the germ of everything that followed, was to reconceptualise the natural world in transcendental realist terms, ¿turning Kant around using his own method¿. On this account, the universe is characterized by deep structures, mechanisms and fields that generate the flux of phenomena, and is in open, creative and emergent process. This completely recasts the terms of the debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism by remedying its false grounds and shows how philosophy can be liberated from its anthropocentric/anthropomorphic prison and rendered consistent with the best insights of modern natural science. There is necessity in nature quite independent of humans, but in an open world causation is multiple and conjunctural, the actual course of the unfolding of being is highly contingent and the bases of human freedom can be understood scientifically. Written as a DPhil thesis when Bhaskar was in his mid-twenties, Empiricism and the Metatheory of the Social Sciences brilliantly launches this reconceptualisation and explores its implications for social science in the course of carrying through the metatheoretical destruction of empiricism. It will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the development of Bhaskar¿s thought, in transcendental realism, and in the critique of empiricism, more generally of the philosophical discourse of Western modernity. (shrink)

Hume defined ‘cause’ three times over. The two principal definitions (constant conjunction, felt determination) provide the anchors for the two main strands of the modem empiricist accounts of laws of nature 1 while the third (the counter factual definition 2) may be seen as the inspiration of the nonHumean necessitarian analyses. Corresponding to the felt determination definition is the account of laws that emphasizes human attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Latter day weavers of this strand include Nelson Goodman, A. (...) J. Ayer, and Nicholas Rescher. In Fact, Fiction and Forecast Goodman writes: “I want to emphasize the Humean idea that rather than a sentence being used for prediction because it is a law, it is called a law because it is used for prediction” (1955, p. 62). In “What is a law of nature?”, Ayer explains that the difference between ‘generalizations of fact’ and ‘generalizations of law’ “lies not so much on the side of facts which make them true, as in the attitude of those who put them forward” (1956, p. 162). And in a similar vein, Rescher maintains that lawfulness is “mind-dependent”; it is not something which is discovered but which is supplied: “Lawfulness is not found in or extracted from the evidence but superadded to it. Lawfulness is a matter of imputation” (1970, p. 107). By contrast, the constant conjunction definition promotes the view that laws are to be analyzed in terms of the de re characteristics of regularities, independently of the attitudes and actions of actual or potential knowers. (shrink)

Kant introduces empiricism as a deficient position that is unsuitable for the generation of scientific knowledge. The reason for this is that, according to him, empiricism fails to connect with the world by remaining trapped within the realm of appearances. If we follow Galen’s account of the debate ensuing among Hellenistic doctors in the third century B.C., empiricism presents itself in an entirely different light. It emerges as a position that criticises medical practitioners who stray away from the here (...) and now by indulging in theory-driven a priori forms of reasoning. In so doing empiricism remains at all times committed to the world and its agents. In this paper Galen’s account of empiricism will serve me as a means to unravel the dynamics of a discussion that aims to reassess the standards of a dogmatic scientific practice. By looking at Bacon’s and Gassendi’s perception of the ancient medical tradition I will furthermore show that the understanding of what empiricism is crucially depends on the understanding of what scepticism is. (shrink)

A first step is taken towards articulating a constructive empiricist philosophy of mathematics, thus extending van Fraassen's account to this domain. In order to do so, I adapt Field's nominalization program, making it compatible with an empiricist stance. Two changes are introduced: (a) Instead of taking conservativeness as the norm of mathematics, the empiricist countenances the weaker notion of quasi-truth (as formulated by da Costa and French), from which the formal properties of conservativeness are derived; (b) (...) Instead of quantifying over spacetime regions, the empiricist only admits quantification over occupied regions, since this is enough for his or her needs. (shrink)