Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation
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Arguments Vs. Explanations
Arguments vs. Explanations Arguments and explanations share a lot of common features. In fact, it can be hard to tell the difference between them if you look just at the structure. Sometimes, the exact same structure can function as an argument or as an explanation depending on the context. At the same time, arguments are very different in terms of what they try to accomplish. Explaining and arguing are very different activities even though they use the same types of structures. In a similar vein, building something and taking it apart are two very different activities, but we typically use the same tools for both. Arguments and explanations both have a single sentence as their primary focus. In an argument, we call that sentence the “conclusion”, it’s what’s being argued for. In an explanation, that sentence is called the “explanandum”, it’s what’s being explained. All of the other sentences in an argument or explanation are focused on the conclusion or explanandum. In an argument, these other sentences are called “premises” and they provide basic reasons for thinking that the conclusion is true. In an explanation, these other sentences are called the “explanans” and provide information about how or why the explanandum is true. So in both cases we have a bunch of sentences all focused on one single sentence. That’s why it’s easy to confuse arguments and explanations, they have a similar structure. Premises/Explanans Conclusion/Explanandum What is an argument? An argument is an attempt to provide support for a claim. One useful way of thinking about this is that an argument is, at least potentially, something that could be used to persuade someone about the truth of the argument’s conclusion. -
Forthcoming in the Kant Yearbook, Vol. 11 (2019) Final Draft – Please Cite the Published Version for Correct Pagination
Forthcoming in The Kant Yearbook, Vol. 11 (2019) Final Draft – Please cite the published version for correct pagination Can there be a Finite Interpretation of the Kantian Sublime? Sacha Golob (King’s College London) Abstract Kant’s account of the sublime makes frequent appeals to infinity, appeals which have been extensively criticised by commentators such as Budd and Crowther. This paper examines the costs and benefits of reconstructing the account in finitist terms. On the one hand, drawing on a detailed comparison of the first and third Critiques, I argue that the underlying logic of Kant’s position is essentially finitist. I defend the approach against longstanding objections, as well as addressing recent infinitist work by Moore and Smith. On the other hand, however, I argue that finitism faces distinctive problems of its own: whilst the resultant theory is a coherent and interesting one, it is unclear in what sense it remains an analysis of the sublime. I illustrate the worry by juxtaposing the finitist reading with analytical cubism. §1 – Introduction Kant’s account of the sublime makes frequent reference to infinity. The “intuition” of the sublime “carries with it the idea of...infinity”; apprehension “can progress to infinity” [kann…ins Unendliche gehen]; imagination “strives to progress towards infinity” [ein Bestreben zum Fortschritte ins Unendliche]; reason demands that we “think the infinite as a whole” (KU 5:255, 252, 250, 254).1 It is obvious that the infinite played a central role in Kant’s own presentation of the problem. It is less clear whether such references are 1 References are to the standard Akademie edition of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1900–; abbreviated as Ak.): Anth: Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Ak. -
Curriculum Vitae
Dean Franklin Moyar Department of Philosophy Johns Hopkins University 276 Gilman Hall 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21218 [email protected] Professional Experience 2009-present: Associate Professor (with tenure), Department of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University. 2002-2009: Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University. Areas AOS: Kant and German Idealism, Political Philosophy, Metaethics. AOC: Philosophy of Law, Philosophy of Action, 19th Century European Philosophy, Early Modern Philosophy, American Philosophy. Education 1994-2002 University of Chicago, Ph.D. June 2002. 1999-2000 Visiting Scholar, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany. 1990-1994 Duke University. B.S. Summa Cum Laude with Honors in Physics. Second major in Philosophy. Monograph Hegel’s Conscience (Oxford University Press, 2011, paperback 2014). Edited Volumes The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, Editor (forthcoming, 2017). The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy, Editor (Routledge, 2010). Winner, CHOICE award, 2010. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, Co-Editor with Michael Quante (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Journal Articles and Book Chapters “German Idealism,” Knowledge in Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Stephen Gaukroger, (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2017) “Die Wahrheit der mechanistischen und teleologischen Objektivität,” for a collective commentary on the Science of Logic, edited by Michael Quante and Anton Koch (forthcoming from Meiner Verlag, 2017). “Introduction” to The Oxford Handbook -
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. -
Form and Explanation
Form and Explanation Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian What does form explain? More often than not, when it comes to liter- ary criticism, form explains everything. Where form refers “to elements of a verbal composition,” including “rhythm, meter, structure, diction, imagery,” it distinguishes ordinary from figurative utterance and thereby defines the literary per se.1 Where form refers to the disposition of those elements such that the work of which they are a part mimes a “symbolic resolution to a concrete historical situation,” it distinguishes real from vir- tual phenomena and thereby defines the task of criticism as their ongoing adjudication.2 Both forensic and exculpatory in their promise, form’s ex- planations have been applied to circumstances widely disparate in scale, character, and significance. This is nothing new, but a recent flurry of de- bates identifying new varieties of form has thrown the unruliness of its application into relief. Taken together, they suggest that to give an account of form is to contribute to the work of making sense of linguistic meaning, aesthetic production, class struggle, objecthood, crises in the humanities and of the planet, how we read, why we read, and what’s wrong with these queries of how and why. In this context, form explains what we cannot: what’s the point of us at all? Contemporary partisans of form maintain that their high opinion of its exegetical power is at once something new in the field and the field’s 1. René Wellek, “Concepts of Form and Structure in Twentieth-Century Criticism,” Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, Conn., 1963), p. -
Post-Continental Philosophy: Its Definition, Contours, and Fundamental Sources
Post-continental Philosophy: Its Definition, Contours, and Fundamental Sources NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES It is no accident that the global geographical framework in use today is essentially a cartographic celebration of European power. After centuries of imperialism, the presumptions of a worldview of a once-dominant metropole has become part of the intellectual furniture of the world…. Metageography matters, and the attempt to engage it critically has only begun. Martin W. Lewis and Kären W. Wigen, The Myth of Continents.1 or several decades now the contours of legitimate philosophy have been drawn by advocates of F so-called analytic and continental philosophies. Analytic philosophy is often referred to as a style of thinking centered on the question of whether something is true, rather than, as continental philosophy, on the multiple factors that constitute meaning.2 Analytic philosophy is also said to be closer to the sciences, while continental philosophy has more affinity with the humanities.3 One of the reasons for this lies in that while analytic philosophy tends to dismiss history from its reflections, continental philosophy typically emphasizes the relevance of time, tradition, lived experience, and/or social context. Fortunately, this situation is slowly but gradually changing today. A variety of intellectuals are defying the rigid boundaries of these fields. Some of the most notable are Afro- American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latina/o scholars using the arsenal of these bodies of thought to analyze and interpret problems related to colonialism, racism, and sexism in the contemporary world.4 These challenges demand a critical analysis of the possibilities and limits of change within the main coordinates of these different styles or forms of philosophizing. -
Journal of Food Composition and Analysis
JOURNAL OF FOOD COMPOSITION AND ANALYSIS AUTHOR INFORMATION PACK TABLE OF CONTENTS XXX . • Description p.1 • Impact Factor p.1 • Abstracting and Indexing p.2 • Editorial Board p.2 • Guide for Authors p.4 ISSN: 0889-1575 DESCRIPTION . The Journal of Food Composition and Analysis publishes manuscripts on the chemical composition of human foods, analytical methods, food composition data and studies on the statistics, use and distribution of such data. Research areas include: • New methods for the chemical analysis of food • Nutrient, bioactive non-nutrient and anti-nutrient components in food • Flavour and taste components in food. • Food composition database development, management, and utilization • Processes of development and selection of single-value entries for food composition tables The Journal does not consider papers that feature as the major area of study: - Non-specific assays, such as in-vitro antioxidant capacity and total phenolic content - Clinical and pharmacological studies - Natural medicines - Physical properties of foods - Food waste materials - Foods formulated in the laboratory - Microbiological and anti-microbial assays - Sensory quality and organoleptic characteristics of foods IMPACT FACTOR . 2020: 4.556 © Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Reports 2021 AUTHOR INFORMATION PACK 1 Oct 2021 www.elsevier.com/locate/jfca 1 ABSTRACTING AND INDEXING . Scopus AGRICOLA Biological Abstracts CAB International CAB Health Current Contents Dairy Science Abstracts FSTA (Food Science and Technology Abstracts) Nutrition Abstracts ScienceDirect AGORA Foodline: Food Science and Technology Vitis Viticulture and Enology Abstracts EMBiology EDITORIAL BOARD . Editor-in-Chief J. Stephen Elmore, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom Assistant Editor Charlène Girardot Consulting and Founding Editor Kent Stewart, The University of Texas System, Austin, Texas, United States of America Editors Francisco J. -
What Is a Philosophical Analysis?
JEFFREY C. KING WHAT IS A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS? (Received 24 January 1996) It is common for philosophers to offer philosophical accounts or analyses, as they are sometimes called, of knowledge, autonomy, representation, (moral) goodness, reference, and even modesty.1 These philosophical analyses raise deep questions. What is it that is being analyzed (i.e. what sorts of things are the objects of analysis)? What sort of thing is the analysis itself (a proposition? sentence?)? Under what conditions is an analysis correct? How can a correct analysis be informative? How, if at all, does the production of philo- sophical analyses differ from what scientists do? The purpose of the present paper is to provide answers to these questions. The traditional answers to the ®rst and last of these questions are that concepts are the objects of philosophical analysis and that philo- sophical analyses differ from the results of scienti®c investigation in being conceptual analyses. Like many philosophers I am suspicious of the notions of concept and conceptual analysis as traditionally understood. Though the critique of these notions is beyond the scope of the present work, the answers I shall give to the questions raised above shall not invoke concepts (understood as things distinct from properties).2 I count it as a virtue of my account that it is able to provide answers to the questions raised above without an appeal to concepts. And to the extent that it has been felt that concepts are needed to answer these questions, the present account weakens the case for positing concepts. Before addressing these questions, however, we shall make the simplifying assumption that analyses are given in a ªcanonical formº. -
Generics Analysis Canberra Plan.Pdf
Philosophical Perspectives, 26, Philosophy of Mind, 2012 CONCEPTS, ANALYSIS, GENERICS AND THE CANBERRA PLAN1 Mark Johnston Princeton University Sarah-Jane Leslie2 Princeton University My objection to meanings in the theory of meaning is not that they are abstract or that their identity conditions are obscure, but that they have no demonstrated use.3 —Donald Davidson “Truth and Meaning” From time to time it is said that defenders of conceptual analysis would do well to peruse the best empirically supported psychological theories of concepts, and then tailor their notions of conceptual analysis to those theories of what concepts are.4 As against this, there is an observation — traceable at least as far back to Gottlob Frege’s attack on psychologism in “The Thought” — that might well discourage philosophers from spending a week or two with the empirical psychological literature. The psychological literature is fundamentally concerned with mental representations, with the mental processes of using these in classification, characterization and inference, and with the sub-personal bases of these processes. The problem is that for many philosophers, concepts could not be mental items. (Jerry Fodor is a notable exception, we discuss him below.) We would like to set out this difference of focus in some detail and then propose a sort of translation manual, or at least a crucial translational hint, one which helps in moving between philosophical and psychological treatments of concepts. Then we will consider just how, given the translation, the relevant -
Philosophy Program 1
Philosophy Program 1 PHIL 126 – First Year Seminar 1 credit hour PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM The First-Year Seminar provides students with a multidisciplinary experience in which they approach an issue or problem from the Program Objectives perspective of three different academic differences. The First-Year Seminar will consist of three 1-credit hour courses taken as co-requisites • To enable students to develop thoughtful attitudes toward life and the in a single semester. The successful completion of all three courses world through a confrontation with the thought of great philosophers; satisfies the General Studies LOPER 1 course requirement. Students may • To treat such problems as the nature of our individual and social take the First-Year Seminar in any discipline, irrespective of their major or lives, the nature of the world in which we live, and the nature of our minor. Students admitted as readmit students or transfer students who apprehension of, and response to that world. All philosophy courses transfer 18 or more hours of General Studies credit to UNK are exempt will include a close reading and analysis of primary sources and a from taking a LOPER 1 course. substantive writing component. PHIL 188 – GS Portal 3 credit hours Students analyze critical issues confronting individuals and society Philosophy Major in a global context as they pertain to the discipline in which the Portal One option is available in this major: course is taught. The Portal is intended to help students succeed in their university education by being mentored in process of thinking critically 1. Philosophy (http://catalog.unk.edu/undergraduate/departments- about important ideas and articulating their own conclusions. -
Hegel-Jahrbuch 2014
Hegel-Jahrbuch 2014 Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/28/18 7:17 PM Hegel-Jahrbuch 2014 Herausgegeben von Andreas Arndt, Myriam Gerhard, Jure Zovko Begründet von Wilhelm Raimund Beyer (†) Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/28/18 7:17 PM Hegel gegen Hegel I Herausgegeben von Andreas Arndt, Myriam Gerhard, Jure Zovko in Verbindung mit Önay Sözer und Alper Turken DE GRUYTER Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/28/18 7:17 PM ISSN 0073-1579 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/München/Boston Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/28/18 7:17 PM Inhaltsverzeichnis Önay Sözer, Istanbul Opening Speech 11 Hegel vor und in Jena Ricardo Crissiuma, Campinas The young Hegel: tensions and articulations between philosophy and diagnosis of time 12 Jörg Noller, München „Moralische Gesinnung ohne Kampf“ Hegels frühe Freiheitslehre in Auseinandersetzung mit Kant 18 Sandra Viviana Palermo, Pavia Im Äther der einen Substanz Anmerkungen zum Hegelschen Begriff des Absoluten in den ersten Jenaer Jahren 26 Kohei Saito, Tokyo Die Rolle der Differenz in Hegels System der Sittlichkeit 32 Kai-Uwe Hoffmann, Jena Die wahre Natur des Endlichen – Zu Hegels Erkenntniskritik in der Logik von 1804/05 38 Phänomenologie des Geistes Ivan Boldyrev, Berlin Autor, Held und Selbstbegegnung in der Phänomenologie des Geistes 43 Wilfried Ver Eecke, Washington D. -
The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation
Chapter 2 The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation Carl F. Craver Abstract According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331– 496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity.