Philosophy Papers Online

Whereas an inference (deductive as well as inductive) is usually viewed as being valid in virtue of its argument form, the present paper argues that scientific reasoning is material inference, i.e., justified in virtue of its content. A material inference is licensed by the empirical content embodied in the concepts contained in the premisses and conclusion. Understanding scientific reasoning as material inference has the advantage of combining different aspects of scientific reasoning, such as confirmation, discovery, and explanation. This approach explains why these different aspects (including discovery) can be rational without conforming to formal schemes, and why scientific reasoning is local, i.e., justified only in certain domains and contingent on particular empirical facts. The notion of material inference also fruitfully interacts with accounts of conceptual change and psychological theories of concepts.

Review essay of Richard Owen's On the Nature of Limbs: A Discourse edited by Ron Amundson, University of Chicago Press, 2007. This article reviews the recent reissuing of Richard Owen’s On the Nature of Limbs and its three novel, introductory essays. These essays make Owen’s 1849 text very accessible by discussing the historical context of his work and explaining how Owen’s ideas relate to his larger intellectual framework. In addition to the ways in which the essays point to Owen’s relevance for contemporary biology, I discuss how Owen’s unity of type theory and his homology claims about fins and limbs compare with modern views. While the phenomena studied by Owen are nowadays of major interest to evolutionary developmental biology, research in evo-devo has largely shifted from homology (which was Owen’s concern) towards evolutionary novelty, e.g., accounting for fins as a novelty. Still, I argue that questions about homology are important and raise challenges even for explanations of novelty.

English translation of the Introduction of the book 'Why Still Philosophy'. It gives an answer to the question if there is still any point to philosophy. Then, on the basis of such answer, it deals with the question of the role of knowledge in nature, and specifically, of its role in human life and in the life of all organisms. To answer this question it develops a new approach to naturalized epistemology.

A short exposition of a theory of meaning.

Second-order axiomatizations of certain important mathematical theories – such as arithmetic and real analysis – can be shown to be categorical. Categoricity implies semantic completeness, and semantic completeness in turn implies determinacy of truth-value. Second-order axiomatizations are thus appealing to realists as they sometimes seem to offer support for the realist thesis that mathematical statements have determinate truth-values. The status of second-order logic is a controversial issue, however. Worries about ontological commitment have been influential in the debate. Recently, Vann McGee has argued that one can get some of the technical advantages of second-order axiomatizations – categoricity, in particular – while walking free of worries about ontological commitment. In so arguing he appeals to the notion of an open-ended schema – a schema that holds no matter how the language of the relevant theory is extended. Contra McGee, we argue that second-order quantification and open-ended schemas are on a par when it comes to ontological commitment.

This paper is concerned with neo-Fregean accounts of reference to abstract objects. It develops an objection to the most familiar such accounts, due to Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, based upon what I call the 'proliferation problem': Hale and Wright's account makes reference to abstract objects seem too easy, as is shown by the fact that any equivalence relation seems as good as any other. The paper then develops a response to this objection, and offers an account of what it is for abstracta to exist that is Fregean in spirit but more robust than familiar views.

The paper discusses whether there are strictly inexpressible properties. Three main points are argued for: (i) Two different senses of ‘predicate t expresses property p’ should be distinguished. (ii) The property of being a predicate that does not apply to itself is inexpressible in one of the senses of ‘express’, but not in the other. (iii) Since the said property is related to Grelling’s Antinomy, it is further argued that the antinomy does not imply the non-existence of that property.

The paper has two main objectives: first, it presents a new argument against the so-called Anscombe Thesis (if x φ-s by ψ-ing, then x’s φ-ing = x’s ψ-ing). Second, it develops a proposal about the syntax and semantics of the ‘by’-locution.

English translation of Chapter 1 of the book "Why Still Philosophy" where the limitations of analytic philosophy are discussed and an alternative view of philosophy - the 'Heuristic View' - is outlined.

Some argue that Lewisian realism fails as a reduction of modality because in order to meet some criterion of success the account needs to invoke primitive modality. I defend Lewisian realism against this charge; in the process, I hope to shed some light on the conditions of success for a reduction. In §1 I detail the resources the Lewisian modal realist needs. In §2 I argue against Lycan and Shalkowski’s charge that Lewis needs a modal notion of ‘world’ to ensure that worlds correspond to possibilities. In §3 I respond to Divers and Melia’s objection that Lewis needs to invoke primitive modality to give a complete account of what worlds there are. In §4 I ask what it is for a notion to ‘involve’ modality. I conclude that the question is either in bad standing or at best offers little traction on the debate, and propose a different way of assessing when materials are appropriately included in a reductive base.

The discussion presents a framework of concepts that is intended to account for the rationality of semantic change and variation, suggesting that each scientific concept consists of three components of content: 1) reference, 2) inferential role, and 3) the epistemic goal pursued with the concept’s use. I argue that in the course of history a concept can change in any of these components, and that change in the concept’s inferential role and reference can be accounted for as being rational relative to the third component, the concept’s epistemic goal. This framework is illustrated and defended by application to the history of the gene concept. It is explained how the molecular gene concept grew rationally out of the classical gene concept despite a change in reference, and why the use and reference of the contemporary molecular gene concept may legitimately vary from context to context.

Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has received recent discussion and critique, it remains under-developed and is often misrepresented by its critics (section 8).

What are philosophical intuitions? There is a tension between two intuitive criteria. On the one hand, many of our ordinary beliefs do not seem intuitively to be intuitions; this suggests a relatively restrictionist approach to intuitions. (A few attempts to restrict: intuitions must be noninferential, or have modal force, or abstract contents.) On the other hand, it is counterintuitive to deny a great many of our beliefs—including some that are inferential, transparently contingent, and about concrete things. This suggests a liberal conception of intuitions. I defend the liberal view from the objection that it faces intuitive counterexamples; central to the defense is a treatment of the pragmatics of ‘intuition’ language.

In this paper I discuss the view, put forward by several people from Aristotle to Russell, that knowledge is the ultimate purpose and meaning of human life, and I find it wanting. I also argue that all attempts to show that human life has a meaning from an external and higher point of view have been unsuccessful, human life having a meaning only from an internal point of view. I discuss such meaning and argue that, while knowledge is not the ultimate purpose and meaning of human life, it is a precondition of its meaning from an internal point of view.

Paul Sheehy has argued that the modal realist cannot satisfactorily allow for the necessity of God’s existence. In this short paper I show that she can, and that Sheehy only sees a problem because he has failed to appreciate all the resources available to the modal realist. God may be an abstract existent outside spacetime or He may not be: but either way, there is no problem for the modal realist to admit that He exists at every concrete possible world.

Taxa and homologues can in our view be construed both as kinds and as individuals. However, the conceptualization of taxa as natural kinds in the sense of homeostatic property cluster kinds has been criticized by some systematists, as it seems that even such kinds cannot evolve due to their being homeostatic. We reply by arguing that the treatment of transformational and taxic homologies, respectively, as dynamic and static aspects of the same homeostatic property cluster kind represents a good perspective for supporting the conceptualization of taxa as kinds. The focus on a phenomenon of homology based on causal processes (e.g., connectivity, activity-function, genetics, inheritance, and modularity) and implying relationship with modification yields a notion of natural kinds conforming to the phylogenetic-evolutionary framework. Nevertheless, homeostatic property cluster kinds in taxonomic and evolutionary practice must be rooted in the primacy of epistemological classification (homology as observational properties) over metaphysical generalization (series of transformation and common ancestry as unobservational processes). The perspective of individuating characters exclusively by historical-transformational independence instead of their developmental, structural, and functional independence fails to yield a sufficient practical interplay between theory and observation. Purely ontological and ostensional perspectives in evolution and phylogeny (e.g., an ideographic character concept and PhyloCode’s ‘individualism’ of clades) may be pragmatically contested in the case of urgent issues in biodiversity research, conservation, and systematics.

This paper seeks to explain how we can be a priori justified in believing that we are not in a "sceptical scenario" (e.g. that we are not currently being deceived by the machinations of an evil demon). The upshot is that explaining our justification for this belief is less fundamental than explaining our justification for our fundamental belief-forming practices -- including (most notably) the practice that is here called "taking one's experience at face value". If this is indeed a "primitively rational" belief-forming practice, then it is not hard to explain why (in the absence of defeating evidence of various kinds) we are also a priori justified in believing it to be reliable.

This is a review of Kieran Setiya's book Reasons without Rationalism (Princeton University Press, 2007).