PSA 1970


Book Description

This book contains the papers presented at the second biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, held in Boston in Fall, 1970. We have added the paper by Jaakko Hintikka which he was unable to present due to illness, and we have unfortunately not received the paper of Michael Scriven. Otherwise, these proceedings are complete so far as formal presentations. The meeting itself was dedicated to the memory of Rudolf Carnap. This great man and distinguished philosopher had died shortly before. The five talks from the session devoted to recollections of Professor Carnap are printed at the beginning of this book, and they are followed by eight other tributes and memories. We are particularly grateful to Wolfgang Stegmiiller for permitting us to include a translation of his eloge which was broadcast in Germany. The photographs were kindly contributed by Hannah Thost-Carnap. ROGER C. BUCK Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University ROBER T S. COHEN Boston Center for the Philosophy of Science, Boston University Photograph by Francis Schmidt, 1935 Photograph by Adya, 1962 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE v HOMAGE TO RUDOLF CARNAP XI Herbert Feigl, Carl G. Hempel, Richard C. Jeffrey, W. V. Quine, A. Shimony, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, Herbert G. Bohnert, Robert S. Cohen, Charles Hartshorne, David Kaplan, Charles Morris, Maria Reichenbach, Wolfgang Stegmiiller SYMPOSIUM: THEORETICAL ENTITIES IN STATISTICAL EXPLANATION JAMES G. GREENO / Theoretical Entities in Statistical Explanation 3 WESLEY C. SALMON / Explanation and Relevance: Comments on James G.




In Search of a New Humanism


Book Description

This collection of essays presents a systematic and up-to-date survey of the main aspects of Georg Henrik von Wright's philosophy, tracing the general humanistic leitmotiv to be found in his vast, varied output. The analysis covers the developments in Von Wright's thought up to the end of the 1990s. The essays are arranged thematically to focus on the chief areas of Von Wright's interests: practical rationality; human action and determinism; philosophical logic and theories of norms; research in the analytical tradition; and Wittgenstein studies. Readership: Scholars and students of moral philosophy, logic, psychology, sociology, cognitive science and the history of contemporary philosophy.




Blameworthy Belief


Book Description

Believing the wrong thing can have drastic consequences. The question of when a person is not only ill-guided, but genuinely at fault for holding a particular belief goes to the root of our understanding of such notions as criminal negligence and moral responsibility. This book explores the conditions under which someone may be deemed blameworthy for holding a particular belief, drawing on contemporary epistemology, ethics and legal scholarship.




Representational Ideas


Book Description

In Representational Ideas: From Plato to Patricia Churchland Watson argues that all intelligible theories of representation by ideas are based on likeness between representations and objects. He concludes that 17th century materialist criticisms of `having' mental representations in the mind apply to contemporary material representations in the brain, as proposed by neurophilosophers. The argument begins with Plato, with particular stress on Descartes, Malebranche, and Arnauld. He then proceeds with an examination of the picture theory developed by Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Goodman, and concludes with an examination of Patricia Churchland, Ruth Millikan, Robert Cummins, and Mark Rollins. The use of the historical development of representationalism to pose a central problem in contemporary cognitive science is unique. For students, scholars and researchers in neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and modern philosophy.




Scientific Progress


Book Description

Featuring the Gestalt Model and the Perspectivist conception of science, this book is unique in its non-relativistic development of the idea that successive scientific theories are logically incommensurable. This edition includes four new appendices in which the central ideas of the book are applied to subatomic physics, the distinction between laws and theories, the relation between absolute and relative conceptions of space, and the environmental issue of sustainable development.




Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science


Book Description

Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science, is the second volume of a collection on Nietzsche and the Sciences, featuring essays addressing truth, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, with a substantial representation of analytically schooled Nietzsche scholars. This collection offers a dynamic articulation of the differing strengths of Anglo-American analytic and contemporary European approaches to philosophy, with translations from European specialists, notably Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Paul Valadier, and Walther Ch. Zimmerli. This broad collection also features a preface by Alasdair MacIntyre. Contributions explore Nietzsche's contributions to the philosophy of language and epistemology, and include essays on the social history of truth and the historical and cultural analyses of Serres and Baudrillard, as well as new contributions to the philosophy of science, including theological and hermeneutical approaches, history of science, the philosophy of medicine, cognitive science, and technology.




The Reality of the Unobservable


Book Description

Observability and Scientific Realism It is commonly thought that the birth of modern natural science was made possible by an intellectual shift from a mainly abstract and specuJative conception of the world to a carefully elaborated image based on observations. There is some grain of truth in this claim, but this grain depends very much on what one takes observation to be. In the philosophy of science of our century, observation has been practically equated with sense perception. This is understandable if we think of the attitude of radical empiricism that inspired Ernst Mach and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, who powerfully influenced our century's philosophy of science. However, this was not the atti tude of the f ounders of modern science: Galileo, f or example, expressed in a f amous passage of the Assayer the conviction that perceptual features of the world are merely subjective, and are produced in the 'anima!' by the motion and impacts of unobservable particles that are endowed uniquely with mathematically expressible properties, and which are therefore the real features of the world. Moreover, on other occasions, when defending the Copernican theory, he explicitly remarked that in admitting that the Sun is static and the Earth turns on its own axis, 'reason must do violence to the sense' , and that it is thanks to this violence that one can know the tme constitution of the universe.




Logic and Time


Book Description

The subject of this study is Husserl's theory of meaning as it appears in his writings from the Logical Investigations to the Crisis of the European Sciences. The first chapter focuses on HusserI's critique of psychologism and the theory of meaning that stems from it. The second chapter takes its departure from the question of HusserI's attitude towards the Cartesian tradition, then presents the transcendental (noematic) theory of meaning represented by The Idea of Phenome nology, Ideas, and Cartesian Meditations. The third chapter deals with Husserl's interpretation of time consciousness against the background of the development of the problem of time in modem philosophy. Husserl often changed his views regarding the question of meaning. I have tried to understand the reasons for these changes. To do this, I have occasionally disturbed the chronological order of his arguments in favour of a consideration of their logical development and coher ence. Throughout this study, but especially in the digression on consciousness and speech and the Postscript, I have also attempted to bring to the fore a tension in Husserl's thought between two interpre tive strategies: the first I call Cartesian, the other non-Cartesian or hermeneutical.




Freedom and Rationality


Book Description

x philosophy when he inaugurated a debate about the principle of methodologi cal individualism, a debate which continues to this day, and which has inspired a literature as great as any in contemporary philosophy. Few collections of material in the general area of philosophy of social science would be considered complete unless they contained at least one of Watkins's many contributions to the discussion of this issue. In 1957 Watkins published the flrst of a series of three papers (1957b, 1958d and 196Oa) in which he tried to codify and rehabilitate metaphysics within the Popperian philosophy, placing it somewhere between the analytic and the empirical. He thus signalled the emergence of an important implica tion of Popper's thought that had not to that point been stressed by Sir Karl himself, and which marked off his followers from the antimetaphysical ideas of the regnant logical positivists. In 1965 years of work in political philosophy and in the history of philosophy in the seventeenth century were brought to fruition in Watkins's widely cited and admired Hobbes's System of Ideas (1965a, second edition 1973d). This book is an important contribution not just to our understanding of Hobbes's political thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, to our understanding of the way in which a system of ideas is constituted and applied. Watkins built on earlier work in developing an account of Hobbes's ideas in which was revealed and clarifled the unity of Hobbes's metaphysical, epistemological and political ideas.




The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World


Book Description

I Twenty-five years ago, at the Conference on the Comparative Reception of Darwinism held at the University of Texas in 1972, only two countries of the Iberian world-Spain and Mexico-were represented.' At the time, it was apparent that the topic had attracted interest only as regarded the "mainstream" science countries of Western Europe, plus the United States. The Eurocentric bias of professional history of science was a fact. The sea change that subsequently occurred in the historiography of science makes 1972 appear something like the antediluvian era. Still, we would like to think that that meeting was prescient in looking beyond the mainstream science countries-as then perceived-in order to test the variation that ideas undergo as they pass from center to periphery. One thing that the comparative study of the reception of ideas makes abundantly clear, however, is the weakness of the center/periphery dichotomy from the perspective of the diffusion of scientific ideas. Catholics in mainstream countries, for example, did not handle evolution much better than did their corre1igionaries on the fringes. Conversely, Darwinians in Latin America were frequently better placed to advance Darwin's ideas in a social and political sense than were their fellow evolutionists on the Continent. The Texas meeting was also a marker in the comparative reception of scientific ideas, Darwinism aside. Although, by 1972, scientific institutions had been studied comparatively, there was no antecedent for the comparative history of scientific ideas.