Lessons on Truth from Kant*
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The Polarization of Reality †
AEA Papers and Proceedings 2020, 110: 324–328 https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20201072 The Polarization of Reality † By Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva* Evidence is growing that Americans are voters have been illustrated in the political sci- polarized not only in their views on policy issues ence literature. Bartels 2002 shows that party and attitudes toward government and society identification shapes (perception) of economic but also in their perceptions of the same factual indicators that can be seen as the government’s reality. In this paper, we conceptualize how to “performance indicators” e.g., unemployment think about the polarization of reality and review or inflation , with Republicans( being more opti- recent papers that show that Republicans and mistic than) Democrats on economic variables Democrats as well as Trump and non-Trump during the Reagan presidency.1 Similar results voters since (2016 view the same reality through about the importance of partisan assessment a different lens. Perhaps) as a result, they hold of the government’s performance in shaping different views about policies and what should perceptions of economic indicators is found in be done to address different economic and social Conover, Feldman, and Knight 1987 . More issues. recently, Jerit and Barabas 2012( shows) that The direction of causality is unclear. On the people perceive the same reality( in a) way consis- one hand, individuals could select into political tent with their political views and that learning affiliations on the basis of their perceptions of is selective: partisans have higher knowledge reality. On the other hand, political affiliation for facts that corroborate their world views and affects the information one receives, the groups lower knowledge of facts that challenge them. -
Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Chemistry
Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Chemistry Jaap van Brakel Abstract: In this paper I assess the relation between philosophy of chemistry and (general) philosophy of science, focusing on those themes in the philoso- phy of chemistry that may bring about major revisions or extensions of cur- rent philosophy of science. Three themes can claim to make a unique contri- bution to philosophy of science: first, the variety of materials in the (natural and artificial) world; second, extending the world by making new stuff; and, third, specific features of the relations between chemistry and physics. Keywords : philosophy of science, philosophy of chemistry, interdiscourse relations, making stuff, variety of substances . 1. Introduction Chemistry is unique and distinguishes itself from all other sciences, with respect to three broad issues: • A (variety of) stuff perspective, requiring conceptual analysis of the notion of stuff or material (Sections 4 and 5). • A making stuff perspective: the transformation of stuff by chemical reaction or phase transition (Section 6). • The pivotal role of the relations between chemistry and physics in connection with the question how everything fits together (Section 7). All themes in the philosophy of chemistry can be classified in one of these three clusters or make contributions to general philosophy of science that, as yet , are not particularly different from similar contributions from other sci- ences (Section 3). I do not exclude the possibility of there being more than three clusters of philosophical issues unique to philosophy of chemistry, but I am not aware of any as yet. Moreover, highlighting the issues discussed in Sections 5-7 does not mean that issues reviewed in Section 3 are less im- portant in revising the philosophy of science. -
Life with Augustine
Life with Augustine ...a course in his spirit and guidance for daily living By Edmond A. Maher ii Life with Augustine © 2002 Augustinian Press Australia Sydney, Australia. Acknowledgements: The author wishes to acknowledge and thank the following people: ► the Augustinian Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel, Australia, for support- ing this project, with special mention of Pat Fahey osa, Kevin Burman osa, Pat Codd osa and Peter Jones osa ► Laurence Mooney osa for assistance in editing ► Michael Morahan osa for formatting this 2nd Edition ► John Coles, Peter Gagan, Dr. Frank McGrath fms (Brisbane CEO), Benet Fonck ofm, Peter Keogh sfo for sharing their vast experience in adult education ► John Rotelle osa, for granting us permission to use his English translation of Tarcisius van Bavel’s work Augustine (full bibliography within) and for his scholarly advice Megan Atkins for her formatting suggestions in the 1st Edition, that have carried over into this the 2nd ► those generous people who have completed the 1st Edition and suggested valuable improvements, especially Kath Neehouse and friends at Villanova College, Brisbane Foreword 1 Dear Participant Saint Augustine of Hippo is a figure in our history who has appealed to the curiosity and imagination of many generations. He is well known for being both sinner and saint, for being a bishop yet also a fellow pilgrim on the journey to God. One of the most popular and attractive persons across many centuries, his influence on the church has continued to our current day. He is also renowned for his influ- ence in philosophy and psychology and even (in an indirect way) art, music and architecture. -
Notes on Pragmatism and Scientific Realism Author(S): Cleo H
Notes on Pragmatism and Scientific Realism Author(s): Cleo H. Cherryholmes Source: Educational Researcher, Vol. 21, No. 6, (Aug. - Sep., 1992), pp. 13-17 Published by: American Educational Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1176502 Accessed: 02/05/2008 14:02 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aera. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Notes on Pragmatismand Scientific Realism CLEOH. CHERRYHOLMES Ernest R. House's article "Realism in plicit declarationof pragmatism. Here is his 1905 statement ProfessorResearch" (1991) is informative for the overview it of it: of scientificrealism. -
Philosophy of Chemistry: an Emerging Field with Implications for Chemistry Education
DOCUMENT RESUME ED 434 811 SE 062 822 AUTHOR Erduran, Sibel TITLE Philosophy of Chemistry: An Emerging Field with Implications for Chemistry Education. PUB DATE 1999-09-00 NOTE 10p.; Paper presented at the History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Conference (5th, Pavia, Italy, September, 1999). PUB TYPE Opinion Papers (120) Speeches/Meeting Papers (150) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Chemistry; Educational Change; Foreign Countries; Higher Education; *Philosophy; Science Curriculum; *Science Education; *Science Education History; *Science History; Scientific Principles; Secondary Education; Teaching Methods ABSTRACT Traditional applications of history and philosophy of science in chemistry education have concentrated on the teaching and learning of "history of chemistry". This paper considers the recent emergence of "philosophy of chemistry" as a distinct field and explores the implications of philosophy of chemistry for chemistry education in the context of teaching and learning chemical models. This paper calls for preventing the mutually exclusive development of chemistry education and philosophy of chemistry, and argues that research in chemistry education should strive to learn from the mistakes that resulted when early developments in science education were made separate from advances in philosophy of science. Contains 54 references. (Author/WRM) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** 1 PHILOSOPHY OF CHEMISTRY: AN EMERGING FIELD WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR CHEMISTRY EDUCATION PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS Office of Educational Research and improvement BEEN GRANTED BY RESOURCES INFORMATION SIBEL ERDURAN CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproducedas ceived from the person or organization KING'S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITYOF LONDON originating it. -
Is Truth an Epistemic Value?∗
Is Truth an Epistemic Value?∗ Mar´ıa J. Fr´apolli Departamento de Filosof´ıa Universidad de Granada (Espana)˜ [email protected] Introduction That truth is an epistemic value is a thesis that at least has the following two interpretations: Truth can be defined through, or identified with, some epistemic notion or other. This is the epistemic side Truth is something that science, or research, should pursue. Truth is some- thing valuable. This is the value side. Whereas interpretation (i) makes a false statement, interpretation (ii) ex- presses something that is true, although empty. But both interpretations have a grain of truth, and both are, in their own way, somewhat misleading. Their confusing offsprings have been epistemic and metaphysical theories of truth, respectively. The grain of truth in (i) is that the truth predicate is omnipresent when we deal with epistemic notions, and so that not even the most basic theses in epis- temology can be stated without using the truth predicate essentially. Besides, the endorsement role that the truth predicate performs in natural languages is applied in many cases to the items that have passed the kind of justificatory filters sanctioned by epistemology. The grain of truth in (ii) is that the best, and shortest, way of codifying the infinity of contents to whose knowledge science is aimed to is by the help of sentences that involve the truth predicate. The misleading aspect of (i) is that it suggests that truth should be identified with some item out of a set of epistemic situations: ideal justification, results of reliable processes, what the best scientific theories say, etc., and all this in order to seal the gap through which the sceptical menaces to slip in. -
Coherence, Truth, and the Development of Scientific Knowledge*
Coherence, Truth, and the Development of Scientific Knowledge* Paul Thagard†‡ What is the relation between coherence and truth? This paper rejects numerous answers to this question, including the following: truth is coherence; coherence is irrelevant to truth; coherence always leads to truth; coherence leads to probability, which leads to truth. I will argue that coherence of the right kind leads to at least approximate truth. The right kind is explanatory coherence, where explanation consists in describing mech- anisms. We can judge that a scientific theory is progressively approximating the truth if it is increasing its explanatory coherence in two key respects: broadening by explaining more phenomena and deepening by investigating layers of mechanisms. I sketch an explanation of why deepening is a good epistemic strategy and discuss the prospect of deepening knowledge in the social sciences and everyday life. 1. Introduction. The problem of the relation between coherence and truth is important for philosophy of science and for epistemology in general. Many epistemologists maintain that epistemic claims are justified, not by a priori or empirical foundations, but by assessing whether they are part of the most coherent account (see, e.g., Bonjour 1985; Harman 1986; Lehrer 1990). A major issue for coherentist epistemology concerns whether we are ever warranted in concluding that the most coherent account is true. In the philosophy of science, the problem of coherence and truth is part of the ongoing controversy about scientific realism, the view that science aims at and to some extent succeeds in achieving true theories. The history of science is replete with highly coherent theories that have turned out to be false, which may suggest that coherence with empirical evidence is a poor guide to truth. -
Pragmatism, Phenomenalism, and Truth Talk ROBERT BRANDOM
MIDWEST STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY, XI1 Pragmatism, Phenomenalism, and Truth Talk ROBERT BRANDOM his essay offers a rational reconstruction of the career of a certain heroic ap- Tproach to truth-the approach whose leading idea is that the special linguistic roles of truth ascriptions are to be explained in terms of features of the ascribinns of truth, rather than of what is ascrided. The explanatory emphasis placed on the act of calling something true, as opposed to its descriptive content, qualifies theories displaying this sort of strategic commitment as ‘pragmatic’theories of truth, by con- trast to ‘semantic’ ones. The starting point is an articulation of a central insight of the classical pragmatist theories of truth espoused in different versions by James and Dewey. Developing this insight in response to various objections yields a sequence of positions ending in contemporary anaphoric semantics: prosentential theories of ‘true’ and pronominal theories of ‘refers’. These theories articulate an antirealist posi- tion about truth and reference, of the sort here called ‘phenomenalist’.Insofar as the- ories of this sort offer adequate accounts of the phenomena they address, they assert relatively narrow and clearly defined limits to the explanatory ambitions of theories couched in traditional semantic vocabularies. I The popular conception of the theory of truth of classical pragmatism is summed up in the slogan ‘The truth is what works.’ According to this view, the pragmatists were trying to give a theory of truth in the sense of offering necessary and sufficient condi- tions for possession of that property. Their innovation is then seen to consist in tak- ing the possession of this property by a belief to consist in a relation not simply to what is believed, but also to what is desired. -
Theory and Reality : an Introduction to the Philosophy of Science / Peter Godfrey-Smith
2 •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Logic Plus Empiricism 2.1 The Empiricist Tradition The first approach to science that we will examine is a revolutionary form of empiricism that appeared in the early part of the twentieth century, flourished for a time, was transformed and moderated under the pressure of objections, and then slowly became extinct. The earlier version of the view is called “logical positivism,” and the later, moderate form is more usually called “logical empiricism.” There is variation in terminology here; “logical empiricism” is sometimes used for the whole movement, early and late. Although we will be looking at fossils in this chapter, these remnants of the past are of great importance in understanding where we are now. Before discussing logical positivism, it will be helpful to go even further back and say something about the empiricist tradition in general. In the first chapter I said that empiricism is often summarized with the claim that the only source of knowledge is experience. This idea goes back a long way, but the most famous stage of empiricist thought was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the work of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. These “classical” forms of empiricism were based upon the- ories about the mind and how it works. Their view of the mind is often called “sensationalist.” Sensations, like patches of color and sounds, ap- pear in the mind and are all the mind has access to. The role of thought is to track and respond to patterns in these sensations. This view of the mind is not implied by the more basic empiricist idea that experience is the source of knowledge, but for many years such a view was common within empiricism. -
Pragmatic Realism†
Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso Año 4 / 2016 / 2do semestre / N° 8 Págs. 107 - 122 ISSN 0719-4234 / eISSN 0719-4242 Pragmatic Realism† Hasok Chang* Abstract In this paper I seek to articulate and develop Roberto Torretti’s advocacy of pragmatic realism. At the core of Torrietti’s view is a rejection of the notion that the truth of scientific theories consists in their correspondence to the world. I propose to understand correspondence in that sense as a metaphorical notion. I articulate a notion of pragmatist coherence, on the basis of which I make new coherence theories of truth and reality. Then it becomes possible to say that pragmatic realism consists in the pursuit of true knowledge of reality, in a way that is also consonant with Torretti’s pluralism. Keywords: pragmatism, realism, pluralism, coherence, truth, reality Realismo Pragmático Resumen En este trabajo intento articular y desarrollar la defensa que Roberto Torretti hace del realismo pragmático. En el núcleo de la visión de Torretti existe un rechazo a la idea de que la verdad de las teorías científicas consista en su correspondencia con el mundo. Propongo entonces entender la correspondencia como una noción metafórica. Articularé una noción de coherencia pragmática sobre la cual establezco una nueva teoría de la coherencia entre verdad y realidad. __________________En consecuencia, resultará posible afirmar que el realismo pragmático † Recibido: octubre 2016. This paper is partly based on a presentation entitled “Pragmatist Coherence as the Source of Truth and Reality,” given at the sixth biennial conference of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) on 17 June 2016 at Rowan University. -
Evaluating the Truth Campaign
Building a world where young people reject tobacco and anyone can quit Evaluating the truth® Campaign Donna Vallone, PhD, MPH Associate Vice President of Research & Evaluation, American Legacy Foundation truth® is a Brand • Positioned as a brand – Teen brands are a tool for self-expression – The tobacco industry has some of the most successful brands in the world –truth® will compete with tobacco brands Advertising Strategy • Expose the lies of the tobacco industry • Direct teens need to rebel at the tobacco industry • Never preach • Never condemn smokers • Relate to sensation-seeking teens Body Bags Campaign Expectations • Shift core beliefs and attitudes: – Cigarette companies lie – Cigarette companies deny cigarettes cause disease – Taking a stand against smoking is important to me – Not smoking is a way to express independence – Smoking makes people your age look cool or fit in • Influence intention to smoke • Reduce smoking prevalence Key Components of the truth® Evaluation • Legacy Media Tracking Survey (LMTS) – Used to associate self-reported campaign exposure with changes in targeted beliefs and intentions to smoke • Monitoring the Future (MTF) analysis – Used to associate GRPs with changes in youth smoking prevalence Impact of truth®- End of Year One (LMTS data) • Change in Awareness: 75% of all youth (age 12-17) in the U.S. could accurately describe at least one truth® ad. • Change in Beliefs: Targeted beliefs and attitudes changed markedly in the first year of the campaign. Impact of truth®- End of Year One (LMTS data) • Change in Intention to Smoke: Youth with confirmed awareness of truth® were 66% more likely to say they would not smoke in the coming year. -
Proof for the Existence of God Developed by Saint Augustine
Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Master's Theses Theses and Dissertations 1948 The "Psychological" Proof For the Existence of God Developed By Saint Augustine Patrick J. Kremer Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Kremer, Patrick J., "The "Psychological" Proof For the Existence of God Developed By Saint Augustine" (1948). Master's Theses. 250. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_theses/250 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1948 Patrick J. Kremer THE 11 PSYCHOLOGI CAL" PROOF FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD DEVELOPED BY SAINT AUGUSTINE BY PATRICK J. KREMER, S.J. • A THESIS SUmiTTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQ.UIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE 01<' MASTER OF ARTS IN LOYOLA UNIVERSITY DEC:D.1BER 1948 VITA AUCTORIS Patrick J. Kremer, S.J., was born in Detroit, Michigan, June 25, 1919. He attended Visitation Grammar School, and in June, 1935, was graduated from Visitation High School, Detroit, Michigan. In September, 1935, he entered the University of Detroit, from which he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in June, 1939. He entered the Milford Novitiate of the Society of Jesus in September, 1939, and spent three years there. He studied at West Baden College Branch of Loyola University from 1942 to 1944, and has been enrolled in the Loyola University Graduate School since September, 1942.