On the Current Status of the Issue of Scientific Realism
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Some Strands of Wittgenstein's Normative Pragmatism
Some Strands of Wittgenstein’s Normative Pragmatism, and Some Strains of his Semantic Nihilism ROBERT B. BRANDOM ABSTRACT WORK TYPE In this reflection I address one of the critical questions this monograph is Article about: How to justify proposing yet another semantic theory in the light of Wittgenstein’s strong warnings against it. I see two clear motives for ARTICLE HISTORY Wittgenstein’s semantic nihilism. The first one is the view that philosophical Received: problems arise from postulating hypothetical entities such as ‘meanings’. To 27–January–2018 dissolve the philosophical problems rather than create new ones, Wittgenstein Accepted: suggests substituting ‘meaning’ with ‘use’ and avoiding scientism in philosophy 3–March–2018 together with the urge to penetrate in one's investigation to unobservable depths. I believe this first motive constitutes only a weak motive for ARTICLE LANGUAGE Wittgenstein’s quietism, because there are substantial differences between English empirical theories in natural sciences and semantic theories in philosophy that KEYWORDS leave Wittgenstein’s assimilation of both open to criticism. But Wittgenstein is Meaning and Use right, on the second motive, that given the dynamic character of linguistic Hypothetical Entities practice, the classical project of semantic theory is a disease that can be Antiscientism removed or ameliorated only by heeding the advice to replace concern with Semantic Nihilism meaning by concern with use. On my view, this does not preclude, however, a Linguistic Dynamism different kind of theoretical approach to meaning that avoids the pitfalls of the Procrustean enterprise Wittgenstein complained about. © Studia Humanitatis – Universidad de Salamanca 2019 R. Brandom (✉) Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin University of Pittsburgh, USA Vol. -
A Priori Rules: Wittgenstein on the Normativity of Logic
A Priori Rules: Wittgenstein on the Normativity of Logic Peter Railton The University of Michigan Introduction Like many, I have long been uneasy with the category of the a priori. Perhaps I have simply misunderstood it. It has seemed to me, at any rate, that asserting a claim or principle as a priori is tantamount to claiming that we would be justified in ruling out alternatives in advance, no matter what the future course of experience might hold. Yet in my own case, I have felt it would be mere bluffing were I to lodge such a claim. I certainly could not discover in myself any sense of the requisite authority, nor even any clear idea of where to look for guidance in forming it. Contemplating widely-used examples of "propositions true a priori" did not remove my worry. For a start, there was the shadow of history. A claim like "logical truth is a priori" or "the attribution of rationality is a priori in intentional explanation" kept sounding, to my ears, as if they echoed "the Euclidean geometry of space is a priori" or "the principle of sufficient reason is a priori in physical explanation". And these echoes awakened just sort of the worry that had initially unsettled me: I would pronouce myself satisfied that certain claims, at least, were safe from the threat of contrary experience, just on the eve of developments in our on-going view of the world that would lead a sensible person to want to reopen the question. So I would emerge looking like the (perhaps apocryphal) fellow who claimed, in the wake of the great inventions of the nineteenth century, that the US Patent Office could now be closed, since all the really new ideas had been used up. -
A Humean Analysis of Scientific Realism 1
Published in Ensaios sobre Hume, Lívia Guimarães (org.), Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Segrac Editora, 2005b. Pp. 89-108. ____________________________________________________________________ A Humean analysis of scientific realism 1 SILVIO SENO CHIBENI Departamento de Filosofia, IFCH Universidade Estadual de Campinas Caixa Postal 6110 – 13083050, Campinas, SP, Brazil web-site: www.unicamp.br/~chibeni – e-mail: [email protected] Abstract: In their criticism of scientific realism, contemporary philosophers of science often assume that this position is incompatible with empiricism, the epistemological thesis according to which all factual knowledge is grounded on experience. Little attention is paid, however, to the roots of empiricism in modern philosophy. The present article aims to contribute to filling this gap, by examining the implications of Hume’s version of empiricism to the issue of scientific realism. It is shown, first, how scientific realism is negatively affected by Hume’s theories of ideas and causality. Secondly, the prospects of overcoming these difficulties by appealing to the method of hypotheses are examined, first through a survey of Hume’s own stand concerning hypotheses, and then by direct philosophical analysis. 1. Introduction In contemporary philosophy of science, scientific realism is commonly thought of as being challenged either by “constructivism” or by “empiricism” (see e.g. Boyd 1984). However, the use of the word ‘empiricism’ in this context is somewhat misleading. The term has originally been coined to designate an epistemological thesis concerning the problem of the sources of knowledge, paradigmatically defended by philosophers such as Locke and Hume. In this 1 Parts of this work were first presented in a conference given in the 3rd Encontro de Filosofia Analítica, held in Florianópolis, Brazil, in October 1997. -
Quantum Logical Causality, Category Theory, and the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead
Quantum Logical Causality, Category Theory, and the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead Connecting Zafiris’ Category Theoretic Models of Quantum Spacetime and the Logical-Causal Formalism of Quantum Relational Realism Workshop Venue: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Chair for Philosophy (building RAC) Raemistrasse 36, 8001 Zurich Switzerland January 29 – 30, 2010 I. Aims and Motivation Recent work in the natural sciences—most notably in the areas of theoretical physics and evolutionary biology—has demonstrated that the lines separating philosophy and science have all but vanished with respect to current explorations of ‘fundamental’ questions (e.g., string theory, multiverse cosmologies, complexity-emergence theories, the nature of mind, etc.). The centuries-old breakdown of ‘natural philosophy’ into the divorced partners ‘philosophy’ and ‘science,’ therefore, must be rigorously re- examined. To that end, much of today’s most groundbreaking scholarship in the natural sciences has begun to include explicit appeals to interdisciplinary collaboration among the fields of applied natural sciences, mathematics and philosophy. This workshop will be dedicated to the question of how a philosophical-metaphysical theory can be fruitfully applied to basic conceptualizations in the natural sciences. More narrowly, we will explore the process oriented metaphysical scheme developed by philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Michael Epperson’s application of this scheme to recent work in quantum mechanics, and the relation of these to Elias Zafiris’s category theoretic model of quantum event structures. Our aim is to give participants from various fields of expertise (see list below) the opportunity to exchange their specialized knowledge in the context of a collaborative exploration of the fundamental questions raised by recent scholarship in physics and mathematics. -
A Brief Look at Mathematics and Theology Philip J
Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal Issue 27 Article 14 Winter 1-1-2004 A Brief Look at Mathematics and Theology Philip J. Davis Brown University Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/hmnj Part of the Logic and Foundations of Mathematics Commons, Mathematics Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Davis, Philip J. (2004) "A Brief Look at Mathematics and Theology," Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal: Iss. 27, Article 14. Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/hmnj/vol1/iss27/14 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Claremont at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 A Brief Look at Mathematics and Theology Philip J. Davis "Such a really remarkable discovery. I wanted your opinion on it. You know the formula m over naught equals infinity, m being any positive number? [m/0 = ]. Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by naught? In which case you have m equals infinity times naught [m = x 0]. That is to say, a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. Doesn't that demonstrate the creation of the Universe by an infinite power out of nothing? Doesn't it?" Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, (1928), Chapter XI. I Introduction We are living in a mathematical age. Our lives, from the personal to the communal, from the communal to the international, from the biological and physical to the economic and even to the ethical, are increasingly mathematicized. -
Contemporary Issues Concerning Scientific Realism
The Future of the Scientific Realism Debate: Contemporary Issues Concerning Scientific Realism Author(s): Curtis Forbes Source: Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2018) 1-11. Published by: The University of Toronto DOI: 10.4245/sponge.v9i1. EDITORIALOFFICES Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Room 316 Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1K7 [email protected] Published online at jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/SpontaneousGenerations ISSN 1913 0465 Founded in 2006, Spontaneous Generations is an online academic journal published by graduate students at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. There is no subscription or membership fee. Spontaneous Generations provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. The Future of the Scientific Realism Debate: Contemporary Issues Concerning Scientific Realism Curtis Forbes* I. Introduction “Philosophy,” Plato’s Socrates said, “begins in wonder” (Theaetetus, 155d). Two and a half millennia later, Alfred North Whitehead saw fit to add: “And, at the end, when philosophical thought has done its best, the wonder remains” (1938, 168). Nevertheless, we tend to no longer wonder about many questions that would have stumped (if not vexed) the ancients: “Why does water expand when it freezes?” “How can one substance change into another?” “What allows the sun to continue to shine so brightly, day after day, while all other sources of light and warmth exhaust their fuel sources at a rate in proportion to their brilliance?” Whitehead’s addendum to Plato was not wrong, however, in the sense that we derive our answers to such questions from the theories, models, and methods of modern science, not the systems, speculations, and arguments of modern philosophy. -
Scientific Realism and Epistemology
SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY 1 Introduction Here are some theses frequently endorsed by scientific realists: R1 The theories of mature sciences are very frequently highly success- ful (where the success of a theory may be articulated in various ways, e.g. the theory passes severe tests, or it makes novel pre- dictions that are confirmed by observation, or it provides a unified explanation of disparate phenomena, etc.). R2 The theories of mature sciences are very frequently true or close to the truth. And so, frequently, the entities, often unobservable, posited by the theories of mature sciences exist. R3 This success is not accidental. Our belief in theories (or in their ap- proximate truth) is frequently justified and amounts to knowledge. R4 The reasoning process by which we come to believe the theories of mature sciences very often is an inference to the best explanation. R5 The reason why we should believe R2 is R1. That is the best ex- planation for the success of the theories of mature sciences is that those theories are very frequently true or nearly true. Here are two theses endorsed by many anti-realists: A1 The apparently well-confirmed theories of mature sciences are very frequently found, in the long run, to be false. A2 We should expect current theories to be falsified in due course (by induction on A1). And here are theses endorsed by some anti-realists: A3 We cannot know that a theory involving commitment to unobserv- able entities is true or close to the truth. A4 Inference to the best explanation is not a reliable means of infer- ring that a theory is true (or approximately true), at least if it in- volves commitment to unobservable entities. -
Some Strands of Wittgenstein's Normative Pragmatism, and Some
Some Strands of Wittgenstein’s Normative Pragmatism, and Some Strains of his Semantic Nihilism ROBERT B. BRANDOM §1. Strands of Normative Pragmatism FIRST READ THE TRIUMVIRATE of classical American pragmatists as an I undergraduate, under the tutelage of Bruce Kuklick. He saw them as instituting a vibrant philosophical tradition that was visibly continued not only by C. I. Lewis, but by his students Goodman and Quine. (More controversially, but I believe, also correctly, he further saw the semantic holism Quine shared with Sellars as picking up a central strand of the idealist tradition —represented in the Golden Age by Lewis’s teacher Josiah Royce— with which pragmatism had always been in conversation.) My Doktorvater Richard Rorty then made familiar to me an understanding of pragmatism sufficiently capacious to include such disparate and reciprocally unsympathetic philosophers as the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, as well as Sellars, and Quine’s student Davidson. I came to think of pragmatism as a house with many mansions, comprising a number of more or less closely related but distinct and separable commitments, relating various thinkers in the way Wittgenstein made famous under the rubric of “family resemblances.” Excavating the conceptual antecedents of those various pragmatist views led me to see some of the most central among them as rooted firmly in the thought of the German Idealists, Kant and Hegel —as Peirce and Dewey had explicitly avowed1. Among the most important of these antecedents is a thought that I take it serves as a fundamental orienting insight for the later Wittgenstein. This is the idea that intentionality is through and through a normative phenomenon. -
Hilary Putnam and Immanuel Kant: Two ‘Internal Realists’?
DERMOT MORAN HILARY PUTNAM AND IMMANUEL KANT: TWO ‘INTERNAL REALISTS’? ABSTRACT. Since 1976 Hilary Putnam has drawn parallels between his ‘internal’, ‘prag- matic’, ‘natural’ or ‘common-sense’ realism and Kant’s transcendental idealism. Putnam reads Kant as rejecting the then current metaphysical picture with its in-built assumptions of a unique, mind-independent world, and truth understood as correspondence between the mind and that ready-made world. Putnam reads Kant as overcoming the false dichotomies inherent in that picture and even finds some glimmerings of conceptual relativity in Kant’s proposed solution. Furthermore, Putnam reads Kant as overcoming the pernicious scientific realist distinction between primary and secondary qualities, between things that really exist and their projections, a distinction that haunts modern philosophy. Putnam’s revitalisation of Kant is not just of historical interest, but challenges contemporary versions of scientific realism. Furthermore, Putnam has highlighted themes which have not received the attention they deserve in Kantian exegesis, namely, the problematic role of primary and secondary qualities in Kant’s empirical realism, and the extent of Kant’s commitment to conceptual pluralism. However, I argue that Putnam’s qualified allegiance to Kant exposes him to some of the same metaphysical problems that affected Kant, namely, the familiar problem of postulating an absolute reality (Ding an sich), while at the same time disavowing the meaningfulness of so doing. In conclusion I suggest that Putnam might consider Hegel’s attempts to solve this problem in Kant as a way of furthering his own natural realism. 1. INTRODUCTION: PUTNAM AND KANT Putnam’s central focus since 1976 has been an attempt to articulate a kind of realism which does not end up either falsifying the world, through a false extrapolation from the results of science, or losing it entirely in scepticism and relativism. -
The International Journal of Humanities & Social Studies
The International Journal Of Humanities & Social Studies (ISSN 2321 - 9203) www.theijhss.com THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES & SOCIAL STUDIES Nature of Philosophy Mudasir Ahmad Tantray Ph.D. Scholar, Rani Durgavati University, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India Ateequllah Dar Ph.D. Scholar, Rani Durgavati University, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India Abstract: The aim of this paper is to examine the nature, scope and importance of philosophy in the light of its relation to other disciplines. This work pays its focus on the various fundamental problems of philosophy, relating to Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology Logic, and its association with scientific realism. It will also highlight the various facets of these problems and the role of philosophers to point out the various issues relating to human issues. It is widely agreed that philosophy as a multi-dimensional subject that shows affinity to others branches of philosophy like, Philosophy of Science, Humanities, Physics and Mathematics, but this paper also seeks, a philosophical nature towards the universal problems of nature. It evaluates the contribution and sacrifices of the great sages of philosophers to promote the clarity and progress in the field of philosophy. Keywords: wisdom, intelligence, induction, deduction, existence, sensations, aphorism Plato: “He who has a taste for every sort of knowledge and is curious to learn is a philosopher” 1. Introduction All subjects written and unwritten pertaining to some object for analysis. Philosophy is one such subject pertaining to wisdom. Wisdom is different from intelligence, Cunningness, wit, cleverness and being crafty. It is the noblest feature differentiating a man from the animal kingdom. It is this specialty of head and heart that makes a man the crown of creation or the deputy of God on earth as well as the order or decree of the first cause. -
SCIENTIFIC REALISM in the AGE of STRING THEORY Richard Dawid
SCIENTIFIC REALISM IN THE AGE OF STRING THEORY Richard Dawid String theory currently is the only viable candidate for a unified description of all known natural forces. This article tries to demonstrate that the fundamental structural and methodological differences that set string theory apart from other physical theories have important philosophical consequences. Focussing on implications for the realism debate in philosophy of science, it is argued that both poles of that debate become untenable in the context of string theory. On one side the claim of underdetermination of scientific theories, which represents a pivotal element of empiricism, looses its appeal. On the other side the dissolution of any meaningful notion of an external ontological object destroys the basis for conventional versions of scientific realism. String theory seems to suggest an intermediate position akin to Structural Realism that is based on a newly emerging principle, to be called the principle of theoretical uniqueness. An appreciation of string theory’s considerable impact on basic conceptions of philosophy of science can also contribute to a clearer picture of string theory’s status and relevance in a scientific context. 1: Introduction In one respect quantum mechanics is like the music of Arnold Schönberg: Its restricted accessibility awards eternal youth. The conception that was created 75 years ago to replace the failing laws of classical physics in the microscopic world still looks fresh and exciting and remains the paragon of a modern scientific theory. The unshakable status of the quantum principle as the grand enigma at the base of modern physical inquiry has a peculiar consequence however: It keeps the intellectual community outside a small group of experts strangely insensitive to the significance of the newer developments in foundational physics. -
Reference Failure and Scientific Realism: a Response to the Meta-Induction Author(S): D
The British Society for the Philosophy of Science Reference Failure and Scientific Realism: A Response to the Meta-Induction Author(s): D. Cummiskey Reviewed work(s): Source: The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 21- 40 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Society for the Philosophy of Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/687883 . Accessed: 05/12/2011 11:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press and The British Society for the Philosophy of Science are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. http://www.jstor.org Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 43 (1992), 21-40 Printedin Great Britain Reference Failure and Scientific Realism: a Response to the Meta-induction D. CUMMISKEY ABSTRACT Pure causal theories of reference cannot account for cases of theoretical term reference failure and do not capture the scientific point of introducing new theoretical terminology. In order to account for paradigm cases of reference failure and the point of new theoretical terminology, a descriptive element must play a role in fixing the reference of theoretical terms.