It is argued that neither the "theory-informity" of observations nor the Quine-Duhem thesis pose any in principle threat to the objectivity of theory evaluation. The employment of exploratory theories does not generate incommensurability, but on the contrary is responsible for the mensurability and commensurability of explanatory theories, since exploratory theories enable scientists to make observations which are critical in the evaluation of explanatory theories. The employment of exploratory theories and other auxiliary hypotheses does not enable a theory to always accommodate (...) recalcitrant observations to preserve evidential equivalence with a rival theory. Explanatory theories become rapidly degenerating if exploratory theories or other auxiliary hypotheses which inform the original confirmation base are modified to accommodate recalcitrant observations. (shrink)

The book revives the neutral monism of Mach, James, and Russell and applies the updated view to the problem of redefining physicalism, explaining the origins of sensation, and the problem of deriving extended physical objects and systems from an ontology of events.

In this paper I show that Einstein made essential use of aim-oriented empiricism in scientific practice in developing special and general relativity. I conclude by considering to what extent Einstein came explicitly to advocate aim-oriented empiricism in his later years.

In this paper I argue that aim-oriented empiricism (AOE), a conception of natural science that I have defended at some length elsewhere[1], is a kind of synthesis of the views of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos, but is also an improvement over the views of all three. Whereas Popper's falsificationism protects metaphysical assumptions implicitly made by science from criticism, AOE exposes all such assumptions to sustained criticism, and furthermore focuses criticism on those assumptions most likely to need revision if science (...) is to make progress. Even though AOE is, in this way, more Popperian than Popper, it is also, in some respects, more like the views of Kuhn and Lakatos than falsificationism is. AOE is able, however, to solve problems which Kuhn's and Lakatos's views cannot solve. [Back to Top]. (shrink)

The idea that justified modal belief can be accounted for in terms of empirically justified, non-modal belief is enjoying increasing popularity in the epistemology of modality. One alleged reason to prefer modal empiricism over more traditional, rationalist modal epistemologies is that empiricism avoids the problem with the integration challenge that arise for rationalism, assuming that we want to be realists about modal metaphysics. In this paper, I argue that given two very reasonable constraints on what it means to (...) meet the integration challenge for modality, empiricism is currently at best on a par with, but potentially worse off than, rationalist alternatives, with respect to the integration challenge. (shrink)

Aesthetic hedonism is the default theory of aesthetic value. Some of its critics share with it a pair of unquestioned assumptions, namely, that any theory of aesthetic value should make special appeal to its being the case that the canonical form of aesthetic evaluation is a state of pleasure and to its being the case that the canonical purpose of aesthetic acts is to access pleasure. This paper argues that there is reason to doubt both assumptions. Doubting both assumptions suggests (...) a wider range of alternatives to aesthetic hedonism and primitivist inversions of aesthetic hedonism. (shrink)

According to the causal theory of photography (CTP), photographs acquire their depictive content from the world, whereas handmade pictures acquire their depictive content from their makers’ intentional states about the world. CTP suffers from what I call the Problem of the Missing Agent: it seemingly leaves no room for the photographer to occupy a causal role in the production of their pictures and so is inconsistent with an aesthetics of photography. In this paper, I do three things. First, I amend (...) CTP with Fred Dretske’s distinction between triggering and structuring causes, thereby overcoming the Problem of the Missing Agent. Second, I argue that CTP so amended in fact illuminates two aesthetic interests that we may take in photographs, focussing on photographic portraiture and street photography. Third, I show how reflection on the aesthetics of photography serves to support aesthetic anti-empiricism: the view that the aesthetic value of artworks consists, at least in part, in achievement rather than sensory pleasure. (shrink)

A traditional view is that to be an empiricist is to hold a particular epistemological belief: something to the effect that knowledge must derive from experience. In his recent book The Empirical Stance, and in a number of other publications, Bas van Fraassen has disagreed, arguing that if empiricism is to be defensible it must instead be thought of as a stance: an attitude of mind or methodological orientation rather than a factual belief. In this article I will examine (...) his arguments for this claim in detail. I will argue that they do not succeed and that empiricism is, contrary to van Fraassen's claim, better thought of as a truth‐evaluable doctrine than as a stance. (shrink)

I distinguish between empiricist and rationalist approaches to the idea of the flow of time. The former trace back the idea of the flow of time to the deliverances of our sensory or introspective capacities. According to the latter, the idea of the flow of time is integral to what it is to have a conscious point of view in the first place. I discuss some aspects of what I take to be Ismael’s version of a rationalist approach, which focuses (...) on the point of view of an agent. In particular, I raise some questions as to whether Ismael’s account does succeed in reconstructing the common-sense idea of the flow of time in the sense of Becoming, and where her account leaves us with respect to the ‘two times’ problem regarding the relationship between everyday thought about time and the scientific view of time. (shrink)

Although Hume has no developed semantic theory, in the heyday of analytic philosophy he was criticized for his “meaning empiricism,” which supposedly committed him to a private world of ideas, led him to champion a genetic account of meaning instead of an analytic one, and confused “impressions” with “perceptions of an objective realm.” But another look at Hume’s “meaning empiricism” reveals that his criterion for cognitive content, the cornerstone both of his resolutely anti-metaphysical stance and his naturalistic “science (...) of human nature,” provides the basis for a successful response to his critics. Central to his program for reforming philosophy, Hume’s use of the criterion has two distinct aspects: a critical or negative aspect, which assesses the content of the central notions of metaphysical theories to demonstrate their unintelligibility; and a constructive or positive aspect, which accurately determines the cognitive content of terms and ideas. (shrink)

Taking as their departure point the political-philosophical analyses of German scholar Tilo Schabert, the philosophical and empirical essays in this volume invite the reader to move beyond the sterile dichotomy of political activity as either pure will or as folded into a more manageable activity.

Berent (this issue) critiques one of the three main proposals put forward by Carruthers (this issue), who suggests that cognitive scientists are biased against innateness-claims by the tacit assumptions of the mentalizing faculty. Berent proposes, instead, that the bias results from dissonance produced by a conflict between our innate dualism and our innate essentialism. The present response raises a number of difficulties for her argument.

Notice that I’m not saying that observations we in fact have made are not relevant to our beliefs about what exists. But the mere fact that something is observable does not give us any reason to think that it ever has or will in fact be observed. The issue between us is whether mere observability—as distinct from actual observation—is relevant to our beliefs about what exists. I submit that it is not.

This essay examines the perspective from which Bas van Fraassen, in his book, The Empirical Stance, explains the project of empiricism. I argue that this perspective is a robustly transcendental perspective, which suggests that the tradition of empiricism lacks the resources to explain itself. I offer an alternative history of epistemic voluntarism in twentieth-century philosophy to the history van Fraassen himself provides, one that finds the novelty in van Fraassen's own views to be precisely his reintroduction of the (...) knowing mind into the tradition of analytic philosophy of science. (shrink)

McDowell’s minimal empiricism holds that experience, understood as providing conceptually articulated contents, plays a role in the justification of our beliefs. We question this idea by contrasting the role of perceptual experience in moral and non-moral judgments and conclude that experience per se is irrelevant in the former case and should also be so in the latter one: only with the help of adequate beliefs experience can provide a connection with the world. We conclude with some remarks concerning the (...) importance of experience. (shrink)

These comments, which include informal offhand asides made during delivery, derive from an ‘Author Meets Critics’ session on Robert Brandom’s book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars’ (2015), held at Kent State University and published subsequently in Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy (2017).

This paper examines the views of Joseph-Márie Degérando and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann about empiricism, and the scope and limits of experience as well as its relation to reason and its role in the attainment of true knowledge. While Degérando adopted the “philosophy of experience” and Tennemann advocated Kant’s critical philosophy, both authors blamed each other for the same mistake: if Degérando considered that, despite all appearances to the contrary, critical philosophy fell into empiricism, Tennemann judged that the philosophy (...) of experience was nothing but pure and simple empiricism. Degérando’s and Tennemann’s discrepancies involved not only a discussion of “nomenclatures” and of the role and limits of experience in knowing, but also an epistemological and ideological commitment to the pacification of the intellectual field in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In this line, Degérando’s alignment with the philosophy of experience attempted to distance himself from the politically dangerous sensualism attributed to the idéologie. But, unlike his countryman Charles Villers, he did not want to replace the sensualism by critical philosophy. His opposition to philosophical novelty (which he associated with political revolution) led him to praise only the “eclectic” spirit of Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

Radical skepticism, irrationalism, psychologism, and epistemological despair are popular interpretations of Hume. The theory of causal inference has been supposed to stand at the very heart of Humean skepticism, mainly because of its ‘associationism’. However, the myth of a skeptical Hume—more radical than he really is in his own admitted ‘mitigated skepticism’—has been discredited in recent years. Hume certainly was an associationist about the passions, and moral sentiments, and the rules of justice in society, and many other aspects of human (...) life, as different as literary taste and superstition. There is plenty of evidence of this in Books II and III of the Treatise, in the second Enquiry, in the Dissertation on the Passions and in the Essays. But my main point here is that association of ideas has no cognitive role in his philosophy, beyond serving as “the cement of complex ideas.” Custom or habit do have such a cognitive role, as is well known, and shall be discussed below. (shrink)