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Does the Counterfactual Theory of Explanation Apply to Non-Causal Explanations in Metaphysics?
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PhilSci Archive Does the Counterfactual Theory of Explanation Apply to Non-Causal Explanations in Metaphysics? Alexander Reutlinger Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy LMU Munich [email protected] In the recent philosophy of explanation, a growing attention to and discussion of non-causal explanations has emerged, as there seem to be compelling examples of non-causal explanations in the sciences, in pure mathematics, and in metaphysics. I defend the claim that the counterfactual theory of explanation (CTE) captures the explanatory character of both non-causal scientific and metaphysical explanations. According to the CTE, scientific and metaphysical explanations are explanatory by virtue of revealing counterfactual dependencies between the explanandum and the explanans. I support this claim by illustrating that CTE is applicable to Euler’s explanation (an example of a non-causal scientific explanation) and Loewer’s explanation (an example of a non-causal metaphysical explanation). 1 1. Introduction Since the early 2000s, one finds a strikingly common theme in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics: an increasing attention to non-causal explanations. 1 Many philosophers of science, philosophers of mathematics and metaphysicians take seriously the view that (a) there are – alongside with familiar causal explanations – compelling examples of non-causal explanations in the sciences, and that (b) there are instances of non-causal explanations in pure mathematics and in metaphysics. According to this view, explanation is a goal of many epistemic endeavors, not merely of the natural and social sciences. A significant amount of work has been dedicated to understanding the differences and commonalities of explanations in the sciences and in pure mathematics (see Steiner 1978; Kitcher 1984; and, more recently, Mancosu 2011; Lange 2013, 2014). -
Externalism Is a View About the Conditions for Our Thoughts and Words to Refer to Things
Semantic Internalism and Externalism in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, ed. by Barry C. Smith and Ernest Lepore. Oxford University Press 2006. pp. 323-40. Katalin Farkas Central European University, Budapest 1. Three claims about meaning In a sense, the meaning of our words obviously depends on circumstances outside us. ‘Elm’ in English is used to talk about elms, and though I could decide – perhaps as a kind of code – to use the word ‘elm’ to talk about beeches, my decision would hardly change the English language. The meaning of ‘elm’ depends on conventions of the language speaking community, and these are certainly beyond my control. In this sense, no-one will disagree that meaning is determined by factors outside the individual. At the same time, it seems that it is up to me what I mean by my words; and in fact, the meaning of a word in the language is simply a result of what most of us mean by it. Another way of putting this point is that even if the meaning of an expression is determined by social agreement, grasping the meaning of the word is an individual psychological act. I may grasp the usual public meaning correctly, or I may – willingly or accidentally – mean something different by the word, but it looks that meaning in this sense depends entirely on me. It is also plausible to assume that in some sense, our physical environment contributes to what our words mean. If I am right in assuming that before Europeans arrived to Australia, English had had no word which meant the same as the word ‘kangaroo‘ does nowadays, this is easily explained by the fact that people at that time hadn’t encountered kangaroos. -
Kedwards CV Inprogress.Pages
Philosophy Department 541 Hall of Languages Syracuse University Syracuse, NY 13244-1170 [email protected] Kevan Edwards 31 5-416-2700 (cell) ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS 2008 - Assistant Professor, Syracuse University 2006-2008 Assistant Professor, University of Kansas EDUCATION 2000-2006 Ph.D. in Philosophy, Rutgers University, October 2006 2000 B.A., Specialist in Philosophy, with high distinction, University of Toronto DISSERTATION Oct. 2006 Referentialism without Compromise: Semantics at the Intersection of Mind and Language Committee: Jerry Fodor, Barry Loewer, Stephen Neale, Georges Rey PUBLICATIONS 2014 "Keeping (Direct) Reference in Mind". Noûs 48(2), pp. 342-367. 2013 “Concepts”. Oxford Bibliographies (published online Sept. 30, 2013) http:// www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/ obo-9780195396577-0220.xml 2012 “Review of ‘The Extended Mind’, Edited by Richard Menary.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy: 1-3. 2011 “Higher-level Concepts and Their Heterogeneous Implementations: A Polemical Response to Edouard Machery’s Doing Without Concepts”. Philosophical Psychology, 24(1), 119-133. 2010 “Review of David Thompson, Daniel Dennett”. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20167. 2010 “Unity Amidst Heterogeneity in Theories of Concepts”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 210-211. [Commentary on Machery, Doing Without Concepts (OUP)] 2010 “Concept Referentialism and the Role of Empty Concepts”. Mind & Language, 25(1), 89-118. !1 of !6 2009 “Referring When Push Comes to Shove”. In New Waves in the Philosophy of Language (pp. 60-86). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009 “What Concepts Do”. Synthese, 170(2), 289-310. PRESENTATIONS / COMMENTS / CHAIRED SESSIONS 2014 “The Concept of a Concept, in Philosophy, Psychology, and (Hopefully) Beyond. -
State Board of Education Welcomes Newest Member: Ernest Lepore of Hudson County
NJDOE News For More Information Contact the Public Information Office: Jon Zlock Kathryn Forsyth 609-292-1126 For Release: December 1, 2004 State Board of Education Welcomes Newest Member: Ernest Lepore of Hudson County The State Board of Education today welcomed Ernest Lepore, Ph.D., the associate director of the Rutgers University Center of Cognitive Sciences and a resident of Hudson County, as its newest member. Dr. Lepore was sworn in during this morning’s regular session. "It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Lepore to the State Board of Education," said Acting Gov. Richard Codey. "His expertise in the philosophy of language, in particular, and his expertise as an educator at Rutgers University should help him lead discussions on literacy and other important facets of the Department of Education’s mission." Lepore, who begins a six-year term, replaces Samuel J. Podietz of Burlington County, who served on the Board since 1998. "We are so very pleased to have Dr. Lepore join us in our work," Commissioner of Education William L. Librera said. "His wealth of experience in Higher Education will help him here; we have a sense that his abilities on the collegiate level, particularly in philosophy, will help him serve on the board with an open ear, and a dedication to advancing the education of children throughout the state." "We look forward to working with Dr. Lepore and the many contributions we know he will make to this Board," President Arnold Hyndman said. "I know my own experiences in Higher Education have made my time here on the Board all the more valuable. -
Holism: a Shopper's Guide Jerry Fodor, Ernest Lepore
To purchase this product, please visit https://www.wiley.com/en-eg/9780631181934 Holism: A Shopper's Guide Jerry Fodor, Ernest Lepore Paperback 978-0-631-18193-4 April 1992 Print-on- £34.25 demand DESCRIPTION The main question addressed in this book is whether individuation of the contents of thoughts and linguistic expressions is inherently holistic. The authors consider arguments that are alleged to show that the meaning of a scientific hypothesis depends on the entire theory that entails it, or that the content of a concept depends on the entire belief system of which it is part. If these arguments are sound then it would follow that the meanings of words, sentences, hypotheses, predictions, discourses, dialogs, texts, thoughts and the like are merely derivative. The implications of holism about meaning for other philosophical issues (intentional explanation, translation, Realism, skepticism, etc.) will also be explored. Authors discussed include Quine, Davidson, Lewis, Bennett, Block, Field, Churchland, and others. The book is intended for all those interested in language, mind, metaphysics or epistemology. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jerry Fodor is the author of numerous, and influential, books, most recently A Theory of Content and Other Essays (1990). Ernest Lepore is the co-editor of the recent John Searle and his Critics (Blackwell, 1991) and of two volumes of essays on Donald Davidson, as well as numerous articles on philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. FEATURES * A witty, controversial and partisan book on a subject of central importance to philosophers, psychologists, linguists and cognitive scientists. * It covers all the main positions held by key people in the field. -
Is Internal Realism a Philosophy of Scheme and Content?’
METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 22, No. 3, July 1991 0026-1068 $2.00 IS INTERNAL REALISM A PHILOSOPHY OF SCHEME AND CONTENT?’ EVAN THOMPSON 1. The Aporia of Representation Hilary Putnam has remarked that metaphysical realism is less of a theory than a model of the relation between any correct theory and the world.* The model assumes that there is some way that the world is and that our theories are correct to the extent that we are able to represent the world accurately. But the world is independent of any of our representations; indeed, for all we know, we might be incapable of accurately representing the world. Arguments against metaphysical realism often accept a crucial feature of the realist model. That feature is the view that cognition is essentially representation: the anti-realist typically claims that we cannot get outside our representations to compare them with what they supposedly represent. He argues that no content can be given to the notion of a reality independent of all representations; we can retain talk of the world, therefore, only relative to some system of representation. This notion that we are linked to the world via representations gives rise to an aporia that neither the traditional realist nor anti-realist seems able to disentangle. The realist naturally thinks that there is a difference between representation and that which is represented; such a distinc- tion seems, after all, to be required by the very concept of representa- tion. Thus we might be able to ascertain truth only by looking to the coherence of our representations, but truth itself is a matter of the way the world is, which we get some sense of, perhaps, by inferring to the best explanation. -
A Companion to David Lewis
A Companion to David Lewis Edited by Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer This edition frst published 2015 © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Registered Offce John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offces 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offces, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. -
Johann Frick
JOHANN FRICK Department of Philosophy (609) 258-9494 (office) 212 1879 Hall (609) 258-1502 (fax) Princeton University [email protected] Princeton, New Jersey 08544- http://scholar.princeton.edu/jfrick 1006 AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION Normative Ethics; Practical Ethics (including Bioethics); Political Philosophy. AREAS OF COMPETENCE Metaethics; Causation; Philosophy of Action; Wittgenstein. EMPLOYMENT 2020- Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Present Center for Human Values, Princeton University. 2015 – Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the 2020 Center for Human Values, Princeton University. Feb 2014 – Instructor in the Department of Philosophy and the Center for 2015 Human Values, Princeton University. EDUCATION 2008 - 2014 Ph.D. in Philosophy, Harvard University. • Dissertation: “Making People Happy, Not Making Happy People: A Defense of the Asymmetry Intuition in Population Ethics”; Committee: T.M. Scanlon, Frances Kamm, Derek Parfit. 2005 - 2008 BPhil degree in Philosophy, Merton College, Oxford University. • Distinction in both the written examinations and the BPhil thesis. • BPhil thesis: “Morality and the Problem of Foreseeable Non- Compliance”; advisor: Derek Parfit. • Specialization in Moral Philosophy (tutor: Ralph Wedgwood); Political Philosophy (tutors: Joseph Raz and John Tasioulas); Wittgenstein (tutor: Stephen Mulhall). 2006 - 2007 Visiting student at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. • Courses and seminars at the ENS, the Institut Jean Nicod, and the Collège de France; tutor: François Recanati. 2002 - 2005 BA (Hons.) degree in Philosophy, Politics & Economics, St. John’s College, Oxford University. • First Class Honours in the Final Examinations (June 2005). • Distinction in the Preliminary Examination (June 2003). FELLOWSHIPS, AWARDS, AND HONORS Richard Stockton Bicentennial Preceptorship, Princeton University (2018-2021), awarded annually to one or two assistant professors from all the humanities and social sciences. -
Una Stojni´C
UNASTOJNI C´ personal information contact Department of Philosophy, Princeton University 223 1879 Hall, Princeton University Princeton, NJ, 08544-1006, USA email [email protected] phone +1 (732) 543–5580 academic employment 2019– Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Assistant Professor (TT) 2017–2019 Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, Assistant Professor (TT) Fall 2018 Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Visiting Assistant Professor 2016–2017 Department of Philosophy, NYU, Bersoff Faculty Fellow/Assistant Professor June–September School of Philosophy, ANU, Research Fellow 2016 and 2017 education 2016 Rutgers University, PhD, Philosophy Dissertation Title: Context-sensitivity in a Coherent Discourse Under the supervision of Prof. Jeffrey C. King and Prof. Ernie Lepore 2016 Rutgers University, Graduate Certificate, Cognitive Science Project Title: Meaning and Demonstration Under the supervision of Prof. Matthew Stone (Computer Science) 2010 University of Belgrade, B.A., Philosophy (GPA: 10/10) areas of specialization Philosophy of Language, Formal Semantics and Pragmatics, Logic, Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Science areas of competence Epistemology, Early analytic philosophy papers and publications Book manuscript Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence, completed to appear manuscript, under contract with OUP, UK Forthcoming “Anatomy of Arguments in Natural Language Discourse,” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language, vol 2. Forthcoming “Fodor and Demonstratives in the Language of Thought,” Una Stojnic´ and Ernie Lepore, in Theoria, http://dx.doi.org/10.1387/theoria.20906 Forthcoming “Pointing Things Out: In Defense of Attention and Coherence,” Una Stojnic,´ Matthew Stone, and Ernie Lepore, in Linguistics and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09271-w 2 2019 “Expressions and their Articulations and Applications,” Una Stojnic´ and Ernie Lepore, in Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 19:57, 477–496. -
LYING, MISLEADING, and LANGUAGE by Matthew Knachel
LYING, MISLEADING, AND LANGUAGE by Matthew Knachel B.G.S, University of Dayton, 1999 M.A., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2003 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2014 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Matthew Knachel It was defended on April 3rd, 2014 and approved by Michael Liston, Professor, Department of Philosophy, UW-Milwaukee Mark Wilson, Professor, Department of Philosophy Dissertation Advisor: Kieran Setiya, Professor, Department of Philosophy Dissertation Advisor: James Shaw, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy ii Copyright © by Matthew Knachel 2014 iii LYING, MISLEADING, AND LANGUAGE Matthew Knachel, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2014 My focus is the everyday distinction between lies and other deceptive speech acts—acts of misleading—which involve saying something truthful with the intention of causing one’s listener to have false beliefs. The distinction resists straightforward pre-theoretical formulation, but it is closely tied to the concept of saying: if what someone said, strictly speaking, is true, then she did not lie— though she may have misled. Ever since Paul Grice distinguished what a speaker says from what she otherwise communicates (e.g., via implicatures), theorists have attempted to provide a rigorous circumscription of ‘what is said’. I test these theories according to how well they handle our intuitions about the lying/misleading distinction, and find that no extant account can adequately underwrite that distinction—in the process discovering that the boundary in question is even more difficult to draw than initially expected. -
On What Language Is by David Alexander Balcarras MA, University
On What Language Is by David Alexander Balcarras M.A., University of Toronto (2014) B.A. (Hons.), University of Toronto (2013) Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY September 2020 c 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. Signature of Author . Department of Linguistics and Philosophy September 1, 2020 Certified by . Alex Byrne Professor of Philosophy Thesis Supervisor Accepted by . Bradford Skow Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy Chair of the Committee on Graduate Students 1 On What Language Is by David Balcarras Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy on September 1, 2020 in Partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy ABSTRACT What is language? I defend the view that language is the practical capacity for partaking in communication with linguistic signs. To have a language just is to know how to communicate with it. I argue that this view—communicationism—is compatible with its main rival: the view that we know our language by tacitly knowing a particular generative grammar, a set of rules and principles pairing sounds with meanings. But only communicationism gets at language’s essence. Moreover, the rival view may be false, for there is in fact little reason to think we tacitly know grammars. In chapter 1, I argue that communicationism is compatible with the view that language is con- stituted by tacit knowledge of grammar because the brain states that realize grammatical knowl- edge do so because they enable us to know how to linguistically communicate. -
1 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). Henceforth 'RTH'. the Position Th
[The Journal of Philosophical Research XVII (1992): 313-345] Brains in a Vat, Subjectivity, and the Causal Theory of Reference Kirk Ludwig Department of Philosophy University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611-8545 1. Introduction In the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History,1 Putnam argued that it is not epistemically possible that we are brains in a vat (of a certain sort). If his argument is correct, and can be extended in certain ways, then it seems that we can lay to rest the traditional skeptical worry that most or all of our beliefs about the external world are false. Putnam’s argument has two parts. The first is an argument for a theory of reference2 according to which we cannot refer to an object or a type of object unless we have had a certain sort of causal interaction with it. The second part argues from this theory to the conclusion that we can know that we are not brains in a vat. In this paper I will argue that Putnam’s argument to show that we cannot be brains in a vat is unsuccessful. However, the flaw is not in the argument from the theory of reference to the conclusion 1 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). Henceforth ‘RTH’. The position that Putnam advances in this first chapter is one that in later chapters of RTH he abandons in favor of the position that he calls ‘internal realism’. He represents the arguments he gives in chapter 1 as a problem posed for the ‘external realist’, who assumes the possibility of a God’s eye point of view.