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Would ''Direct Realism'' Resolve the Classical Problem of Induction?
NOU^S 38:2 (2004) 197–232 Would ‘‘Direct Realism’’ Resolve the Classical Problem of Induction? MARC LANGE University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill I Recently, there has been a modest resurgence of interest in the ‘‘Humean’’ problem of induction. For several decades following the recognized failure of Strawsonian ‘‘ordinary-language’’ dissolutions and of Wesley Salmon’s elaboration of Reichenbach’s pragmatic vindication of induction, work on the problem of induction languished. Attention turned instead toward con- firmation theory, as philosophers sensibly tried to understand precisely what it is that a justification of induction should aim to justify. Now, however, in light of Bayesian confirmation theory and other developments in epistemology, several philosophers have begun to reconsider the classical problem of induction. In section 2, I shall review a few of these developments. Though some of them will turn out to be unilluminating, others will profitably suggest that we not meet inductive scepticism by trying to justify some alleged general principle of ampliative reasoning. Accordingly, in section 3, I shall examine how the problem of induction arises in the context of one particular ‘‘inductive leap’’: the confirmation, most famously by Henrietta Leavitt and Harlow Shapley about a century ago, that a period-luminosity relation governs all Cepheid variable stars. This is a good example for the inductive sceptic’s purposes, since it is difficult to see how the sparse background knowledge available at the time could have entitled stellar astronomers to regard their observations as justifying this grand inductive generalization. I shall argue that the observation reports that confirmed the Cepheid period- luminosity law were themselves ‘‘thick’’ with expectations regarding as yet unknown laws of nature. -
Religious Language and Verificationism
© Michael Lacewing Religious language and verificationism AYER’S ARGUMENT In the 1930s, a school of philosophy arose called logical positivism, concerned with the foundations and possibility of knowledge. It developed a criterion for meaningful statements, called the principle of verification. On A J Ayer’s version (Language, Truth and Logic), the principle of verification states that a statement only has meaning if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable. (can be shown by experience to be probably true/false). ‘God exists’, and so all other talk of God, is such a statement, claims Ayer. Despite the best attempts of the ontological argument, we cannot prove ‘God exists’ from a priori premises using deduction alone. So ‘God exists’ is not analytically true. Therefore, to be meaningful, ‘God exists’ must be empirically verifiable. Ayer argues it is not. If a statement is an empirical hypothesis, it predicts our experience will be different depending on whether it is true or false. But ‘God exists’ makes no such predictions. So it is meaningless. Some philosophers argue that religious language attempts to capture something of religious experience, although it is ‘inexpressible’ in literal terms. Ayer responds that whatever religious experiences reveal, they cannot be said to reveal any facts. Facts are the content of statements that purport to be intelligible and can be expressed literally. If talk of God is non-empirical, it is literally unintelligible, hence meaningless. Responses We can object that many people do think that ‘God exists’ has empirical content. For example, the argument from design argues that the design of the universe is evidence for the existence of God. -
Brsq #142-144
THE BERTRAND RUSSELL SOCIETY QUARTERLY Fall 2009 Issue Numbers 142 -144 / May -November 2009 THE ROAD TO CONNECTICUT Published by The Bertrand Russell Society with the support of Lehman College - City University of New York THE BERTRAND RUSSELL SoCIET¥ QUARTERLY is the official organ of the THE BERTRAND RUSSELL SOCIETY Bertrand Russell Society. It publishes Society news and proceedings, and QUARTERLY articles on the history of analytic philosophy, especially those on Russell's life and works, including historical materials and reviews of recent work on Fall 2009 Issue Russell. Scholarly articles appearing in the a"crrfer/,v are peer-reviewed. Numbers 142-144 / May -November 2009 Co-EDITORS: Rosalind Carey and John Ongley ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Ray Perkins Jr. EDITORIAL BOARD Rosalind Carey, Lehman College-CUNY THE ROAD TO CONNECTICUT John Ongley, Bloomsburg University Raymond Perkins, Jr., Plymouth State University Christopher Pincock, Purdue University David Hyder, University of Ottawa CONTENTS Anat Biletzki, Tel Aviv University SuBMISsloNS : All communications to the Ber/ra#cJ Rwssc// Soci.edy gwcrr/er- In This Issue /y, including manuscripts. book reviews, and letters to the editor, should be Society News sent to: Prof. Rosalind Carey, Philosophy Department, Lehman College- ln Memoriam: Theo Meijer CUNY, 250 Bed ford Park Blvd. West, Bronx, NY 10468, USA, or by email to: [email protected]. Feature SuBSCRlpTloNS: The BRS gwc}rfedy is free to members of the Bertrand Rus- sell Society. Society membership is $35 a year for individuals, $40 for cou- Nicholas Griffin Speaks His Mind: An Interview by ples, and $20 for students and limited income individuals. -
Reexamining the Problem of Demarcating Science and Pseudoscience by Evan Westre B.A., Vancouver Island University, 2010 a Thesis
Reexamining the Problem of Demarcating Science and Pseudoscience By Evan Westre B.A., Vancouver Island University, 2010 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS ©Evan Westre, 2014 All Rights Reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. Supervisory Committee Reexamining the Problem of Demarcating Science and Pseudoscience By Evan Westre B.A., Vancouver Island University, 2010 Dr. Audrey Yap: Supervisor (Department of Philosophy) Dr. Jeffrey Foss: Departmental Member (Department of Philosophy) ii Abstract Supervisory Committee Dr. Audrey Yap: Supervisor (Department of Philosophy) Dr. Jeffrey Foss: Departmental Member (Department of Philosophy) The demarcation problem aims to articulate the boundary between science and pseudoscience. Solutions to the problem have been notably raised by the logical positivists (verificationism), Karl Popper (falsificationism), and Imre Lakatos (methodology of research programmes). Due, largely, to the conclusions drawn by Larry Laudan, in a pivotal 1981 paper which dismissed the problem of demarcation as a “pseudo-problem”, the issue was brushed aside for years. Recently, however, there has been a revival of attempts to reexamine the demarcation problem and synthesize new solutions. My aim is to survey two of the contemporary attempts and to assess these approaches over and against the broader historical trajectory of the demarcation problem. These are the efforts of Nicholas Maxwell (aim-oriented empiricism), and Paul Hoyningen-Huene (systematicity). I suggest that the main virtue of the new attempts is that they promote a self-reflexive character within the sciences. -
Alfred Jules Ayer 1910–1989
Copyright © The British Academy 1997 – all rights reserved Proceedings of the British Academy, 94, 255–282 Alfred Jules Ayer 1910–1989 SIR ALFRED AYER, as A. J. or Freddie Ayer came to be known to some extent after 1970, was born on 29 October 1910. His father was Jules Ayer, a French-speaking Swiss from Neufchaˆtel, who had lived in England since coming here to join his mother at the age of seventeen. He worked for some years in Rothschild’s Bank and as secretary to Alfred Rothschild, and died in 1928 at the time when A. J. Ayer was preparing to move from Eton to Oxford. He had married in 1909 Reine Citroe¨n, who was of an Ashkenazi Jewish family from Holland. Her uncle Andre´ set up the car firm which bears the family name, and her father, David, was also in the car business and established the Minerva company. He rescued Jules from bankruptcy in 1912 and set him up in the timber business, where he seems to have prospered mildly. The grandfather appears to have been a larger presence in A. J. Ayer’s early life than Jules. Ayer was born in the family flat in St John’s Wood and lived the solitary urban life of an only child of not very assimilated parents. In 1917 he was sent to a preparatory school at Eastbourne, which Ayer thought resembled the St Cyprians of George Orwell and Cyril Con- nolly, against which matches were played. He worked hard and was well taught, gaining the third classical scholarship to Eton in an exam- ination he was sitting simply as a trial run for a later assault on Charterhouse. -
1 Phil. 4400 Notes #1: the Problem of Induction I. Basic Concepts
Phil. 4400 Notes #1: The problem of induction I. Basic concepts: The problem of induction: • Philosophical problem concerning the justification of induction. • Due to David Hume (1748). Induction: A form of reasoning in which a) the premises say something about a certain group of objects (typically, observed objects) b) the conclusion generalizes from the premises: says the same thing about a wider class of objects, or about further objects of the same kind (typically, the unobserved objects of the same kind). • Examples: All observed ravens so far have been The sun has risen every day for the last 300 black. years. So (probably) all ravens are black. So (probably) the sun will rise tomorrow. Non-demonstrative (non-deductive) reasoning: • Reasoning that is not deductive. • A form of reasoning in which the premises are supposed to render the conclusion more probable (but not to entail the conclusion). Cogent vs. Valid & Confirm vs. Entail : ‘Cogent’ arguments have premises that confirm (render probable) their conclusions. ‘Valid’ arguments have premises that entail their conclusions. The importance of induction: • All scientific knowledge, and almost all knowledge depends on induction. • The problem had a great influence on Popper and other philosophers of science. Inductive skepticism: Philosophical thesis that induction provides no justification for ( no reason to believe) its conclusions. II. An argument for inductive skepticism 1. There are (at most) 3 kinds of knowledge/justified belief: a. Observations b. A priori knowledge c. Conclusions based on induction 2. All inductive reasoning presupposes the “Inductive Principle” (a.k.a. the “uniformity principle”): “The course of nature is uniform”, “The future will resemble the past”, “Unobserved objects will probably be similar to observed objects” 3. -
Phenomenological Verificationism
Husserlian Verificationism Gregor Bös Tue 29th Sept, 2020 Research Seminar Centre for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen Abstract Abstract Verificationism is the name for a family of claims connecting meaning andepis- temic access, mostly known from logical empiricism. The widespread rejection of verificationism was a necessary step for the revival of metaphysics in ana- lytic philosophy, and has for this reason received much attention. Much less discussed are verificationist claims in the early phenomenological tradition. I aim to show in what sense and to what end Husserl commits to a form of ver- ificationism. I then present the Church-Fitch argument as a general challenge to such a commitment. Gregor Bös (KCL) Husserlian Verificationism 2020/09/24 1 / 25 Abstract Outline 1 Introduction: Unlikely Fellows 2 Verificationism in the Phenomenological Tradition 3 Verificationism in the Logical Empiricist Tradition 4 The Church-Fitch Argument against Epistemic Notions of Truth Gregor Bös (KCL) Husserlian Verificationism 2020/09/24 1 / 25 Introduction Outline 1 Introduction: Unlikely Fellows 2 Verificationism in the Phenomenological Tradition 3 Verificationism in the Logical Empiricist Tradition 4 The Church-Fitch Argument against Epistemic Notions of Truth Gregor Bös (KCL) Husserlian Verificationism 2020/09/24 1 / 25 Introduction Context and Background Assumptions Manifest and Scientific Images can get in conflict. Phenomenology promises to ground the scientific in the manifest. Overarching Goal: an explicit proposal for a phenomenological -
THE CONCEPT of the SENSE-DATUM in the PERCEPTUAL ESSAYS of GE MOORE. the Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1966 Philosophy
This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 6 7 -2 5 5 1 TITCHENER, John McLellan, 1937- THE CONCEPT OF THE SENSE-DATUM IN THE PERCEPTUAL ESSAYS OF G. E. MOORE. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1966 Philosophy University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE CONCEPT OE THE 3EN5E-DATUM IN THE PERCEPTUAL ESSAYS OF G.E. MOORE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By John McLellan Titchoner, A.B., M.A., T.l.A. The Ohio State University 1966 Approved by Department of Philosophy PREFACE This dissertation has grown out of a seminar led by Professor Morris Weitz on G.E. Moore. During the course of the seminar I became convinced that no one of Moore1s arguments for the existence of sensc-data was a sound one but felt that I did not understand why Moore employed the notion. I was not, and an not, sure that he intended the introductions of sensc-data to be good arguments. The dissertation attempts to place the concept of the sense-datum in a larger framework 'which will explain the uses to which Moore put the notion. I an indebted to Professor Weitz whose encourage ment got me started on what has turned out to be a most interesting project. I an also indebted to Professor Robert Turnbull who, during Professor V/eitz's leave of absence, took on a half-finishcd dissertation and unstintingly gave me his time and. the benefit of his criticism. -
Reading Heidegger on Science
WHY READ HEIDEGGER ON SCIENCE? Trish Glazebrook Heidegger wrote extensively concerning science for more than sixty years. Four aspects of his analysis in particular demonstrate the breadth and scope of his sustained critique of science, and indicate specific trajectories for its further development. First, he has much to say to traditional philosophers of science concerning the experimental method, the role and function of mathematics and measurement, the nature of paradigms and incommensu- rabilty, and realism versus antirealism. Second, his assessment of technol- ogy is incipient in and arises from his reading of the history of physics, so theorists who overlook this aspect of his work may find they are working with a deficient theoretical framework when attempting to come to terms with his critique of technology. Third, he offers rich conceptual resources to environmental philosophers, especially those who work at the intersection of environment and international development. Fourth, his arguments for reflection on science support a renewed sense of social obligation on the part of the sciences that should be of especial interest to science, technol- ogy, and society theorists. I have examined these first two issues elsewhere.1 Rather than repeat- ing that work here, I situate this volume against traditional philosophy of science only by showing briefly how his concern with science begins with a tension in his thinking between realism and idealism. On the second issue, I show here only how Heidegger’s thinking concerning Ge-stell arises directly from his prior thinking about basic concepts and the mathemati- cal in science. The issues of ecophenomenology and the social obligations of the sciences are continuations of fertile and promising lines of thinking Heidegger opened. -
Reichenbach, Russell and the Metaphysics of Induction
Reichenbach, Russell and the Metaphysics of Induction Michael Shaffer St. Cloud State University Abstract Hans Reichenbach’s pragmatic treatment of the problem of induction in his later works on inductive inference was, and still is, of great interest. However, it has been dismissed as a pseudo-solution and it has been regarded as problematically obscure. This is, in large part, due to the difficulty in understanding exactly what Reichenbach’s solution is supposed to amount to, especially as it appears to offer no response to the inductive skeptic. For entirely different reasons, the signifi- cance of Bertrand Russell’s classic attempt to solve Hume’s problem is also both obscure and controversial. Russell accepted that Hume’s reasoning about induc- tion was basically correct, but he argued that given the centrality of induction in our cognitive endeavors something must be wrong with Hume’s basic assump- tions. What Russell effectively identified as Hume’s (and Reichenbach’s) failure was the commitment to a purely extensional empiricism. So, Russell’s solution to the problem of induction was to concede extensional empiricism and to accept that induction is grounded by accepting both a robust essentialism and a form of rationalism that allowed for a priori knowledge of universals. In this paper the significance of Reichenbach’s solution to the problem of induction will be made clearer via the comparison of these two historically important views about the problem of induction. The modest but important contention that will be made here is that the comparison of Reichenbach’s and Russell’s solutions calls atten- tion to the opposition between extensional and intensional metaphysical presup- positions in the context of attempts to solve the problem of induction. -
Whitehead and Hume on Induction
University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences and Affiliated Societies Nebraska Academy of Sciences 1981 Whitehead and Hume on Induction Marvin E. Kanne University of Nebraska-Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tnas Part of the Life Sciences Commons Kanne, Marvin E., "Whitehead and Hume on Induction" (1981). Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences and Affiliated Societies. 270. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tnas/270 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Nebraska Academy of Sciences at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences and Affiliated Societiesy b an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. 1981. Transactions o/the Nebraska Academy o/Sciences, IX:87-90. PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE WHITEHEAD AND HUME ON INDUCTION Marvin E. Kanne Department of Philosophy University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lincoln, Nebraska 68588 While modem science has made important contributions to the conclusions. Adopting the empirical method of the modern advance of learning, Hume has pointed out that a crucial element of its scientists, Hume indicated that knowledge of the world could methodology is seriously flawed. His analysis concluded that there is be no more than phenomenalistic. That is, if our experience is no rational justification for inductive reasoning. Viewed from another perspective, the point of Hume's criticism would seem to be that the stringently limited to appearances, we can draw no conclu scientist's faith in the order of nature is without any ground in nature. -
Is the Sense-Data Theory a Representationalist Theory?
© 2014 The Author. Ratio Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Ratio (new series) XXVII 4 December 2014 0034-0006 IS THE SENSE-DATA THEORY A REPRESENTATIONALIST THEORY? Fiona Macpherson Abstract Is the sense-data theory, otherwise known as indirect realism, a form of representationalism? This question has been under- explored in the extant literature, and to the extent that there is discussion, contemporary authors disagree. There are many differ- ent variants of representationalism, and differences between these variants that some people have taken to be inconsequential turn out to be key factors in whether the sense-data theory is a form of representationalism. Chief among these are whether a representa- tionalist takes the phenomenal character of an experience to be explicable in virtue of the properties of an experience that represent something or explicable in virtue of that which gets represented. Another is whether representationalists hold a non- reductionist, or naturalistically or non-naturalistically reductionist variant of representationalism. In addition, subtle differences in what one takes phenomenal character to be on the sense-data theory – either awareness of sense-data or the sense-data themselves – together with one’s account of representation, are crucial factors in determining whether sense-data theory is com- patible with representationalism. This paper explores these rela- tionships and makes manifest the complexities of the metaphysics of two central theories of perception.1 1. Introduction Is the sense-data theory of perception – otherwise known as indi- rect realism – a representationalist theory of perception? This question has not received much attention in the literature, despite two facts.