Four distinguished authors have been brought together to produce this elegant study of a much-neglected figure. The book is divided into three sections: Neurath's biographical background and the economic and social context of his ideas; his theory of science; and the development of his role in debates on Marxist concepts of history and his own conception of science. Coinciding with the emerging serious interest in logical positivism, this timely publication will redress a current imbalance in the history and philosophy of (...) science. (shrink)

This conception of natural kinds might be dubbed a 'structural kinds' view. It is the conception of kinds offered by ExtOSR within a Humean framework. To invoke structural kinds also means to invoke structural laws. For laws generalize over ...

While this Journal is not the place for an extended discussion of the exegeticalpoints raised by Thomas Oberdan’s ‘The Vienna Circle’s ‘‘Anti-Foundation-alism’’’ [1998], some brief remarks are required to correct his misunderstand-ing of my position on the relevant issues, to stress the highly controversialstatus of his own interpretation and to counter his portrayal of the dialectics ofthe debate.

In this book, T. L. Short places the notorious difficulties of Peirce's important writings in a more productive light, arguing that he wrote philosophy as a scientist, by framing conjectures intended to be refined or superseded in the inquiries they initiate. He argues also that Peirce held that the methods and metaphysics of modern science are amended as inquiry progresses, making metaphysics a branch of empirical knowledge. Additionally, Short shows that Peirce's scientific work expanded empiricism on empirical grounds, grounding his (...) phenomenology and subverting the fact/value dichotomy, and that he understood statistical explanations in nineteenth-century science as reintroducing the idea of final causation, now made empirical. Those innovations underlie Peirce's late ideas of a normative science and of philosophy as a branch of science. Short's rich and original study shows us how to read Peirce's writings and why they are worth reading. (shrink)

Hans Hahn's long-neglected philosophy of mathematics is reconstructed here with an eye to his anticipation of the doctrine of logical pluralism. After establishing that Hahn pioneered a post-Tractarian conception of tautologies and attempted to overcome the traditional foundational dispute in mathematics, Hahn's and Carnap's work is briefly compared with Karl Menger's, and several significant agreements or differences between Hahn's and Carnap's work are specified and discussed.

It is one of the distinctive claims of Neurath, though not of the Vienna Circle generally, that the Vienna Circle's philosophy was not really German philosophy at all. The relation is, if Neurath is to be trusted, anything but straight-forward. To understand it, not only must some effort be expended on specifying Neurath's claim, but also on delineating the different party-lines within the Vienna Circle.

This response considers the question whether empiricists are condemned to silence about the epistemic agency their theories attribute or presuppose. It is argued that, unlike Reichenbach or Carnap, Neurath allowed for and indeed provided specifications of the role of epistemic agency in scientific inquiry. If this is correct, it underscores once more the need to distinguish between the various strands of logical positivism which show different strengths and weaknesses.

This essay argues that normative judgments, in general, and moral judgments, in particular, are "truth apt" and can be objects of belief. Other main claims are: judgments about reasons, if interpreted as true, do not have metaphysical implications that are incompatible with a scientific view of the world. Two kinds of normative claims should be distinguished: substantive claims about what reasons people have and structural claims about what attitudes people must have insofar as they are rational. Employing this distinction, the (...) practical significance of substantive normative judgments is explained, and critical analysis of expressivist and Kantian views on this question is offered. (shrink)

If there is a movement or school that epitomizes analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, it is logical empiricism. Logical empiricists created a scientifically and technically informed philosophy of science, established mathematical logic as a topic in and tool for philosophy, and initiated the project of formal semantics. Accounts of analytic philosophy written in the middle of the twentieth century gave logical empiricism a central place in the project. The second wave of interpretative accounts was constructed to (...) show how philosophy should progress, or had progressed, beyond logical empiricism. The essays survey the formative stages of logical empiricism in central Europe and its acculturation in North America, discussing its main topics, and achievements and failures, in different areas of philosophy of science, and assessing its influence on philosophy, past, present, and future. (shrink)

While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for (...) robot blame, namely the folk's willingness to ascribe inculpating mental states or "mens rea" to robots. In a vignette-based experiment (N=513), we presented participants with a situation in which an agent knowingly runs the risk of bringing about substantial harm. We manipulated agent type (human v. group agent v. AI-driven robot) and outcome (neutral v. bad), and measured both moral judgment (wrongness of the action and blameworthiness of the agent) and mental states attributed to the agent (recklessness and the desire to inflict harm). We found that (i) judgments of wrongness and blame were relatively similar across agent types, possibly because (ii) attributions of mental states were, as suspected, similar across agent types. This raised the question - also explored in the experiment - whether people attribute knowledge and desire to robots in a merely metaphorical way (e.g., the robot "knew" rather than really knew). However, (iii), according to our data people were unwilling to downgrade to mens rea in a merely metaphorical sense when given the chance. Finally, (iv), we report a surprising and novel finding, which we call the inverse outcome effect on robot blame: People were less willing to blame artificial agents for bad outcomes than for neutral outcomes. This suggests that they are implicitly aware of the dangers of overattributing blame to robots when harm comes to pass, such as inappropriately letting the responsible human agent off the moral hook. (shrink)

Byzantine Empire; economic and social conditions; history.