Conflicting accounts of the role of mathematics in our physical theories can be traced to two principles. Mathematics appears to be both (1) theoretically indispensable, as we have no acceptable non-mathematical versions of our theories, and (2) metaphysically dispensable, as mathematical entities, if they existed, would lack a relevant causal role in the physical world. I offer a new account of a role for mathematics in the physical sciences that emphasizes the epistemic benefits of having mathematics around when we do (...) science. This account successfully reconciles theoretical indispensability and metaphysical dispensability and has important consequences for both advocates and critics of indispensability arguments for platonism about mathematics. (shrink)

The partial structures program of da Costa, French and others offers a unified framework within which to handle a wide range of issues central to contemporary philosophy of science. I argue that the program is inadequately equipped to account for simple cases where idealizations are used to construct abstract, mathematical models of physical systems. These problems show that da Costa and French have not overcome the objections raised by Cartwright and Suárez to using model-theoretic techniques in the philosophy of science. (...) However, my concerns arise independently of the more controversial assumptions that Cartwright and Suárez have employed. (shrink)

Mathematical idealizations are scientific representations that result from assumptions that are believed to be false, and where mathematics plays a crucial role. I propose a two stage account of how to rank mathematical idealizations that is largely inspired by the semantic view of scientific theories. The paper concludes by considering how this approach to idealization allows for a limited form of scientific realism. ‡I would like to thank Robert Batterman, Gabriele Contessa, Eric Hiddleston, Nicholaos Jones, and Susan Vineberg for helpful (...) discussions and encouragement. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Beering Hall, Purdue University, 100 N. University Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2098; e-mail: pincock@purdue.edu. (shrink)

This article aims to give an overview of Carnap's 1928 book Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau and the most influential interpretations of its significance. After giving an outline of the book in Section 2 , I turn to the first sustained interpretations of the book offered by Goodman and Quine in Section 3 . Section 4 explains how this empirical reductionist interpretation was largely displaced by its main competitor. This is the line of interpretation offered by Friedman and (...) Richardson which focuses on issues of objectivity. In Section 5 , I turn to two more recent interpretations that can be thought of as emphasizing Carnap's concern with rational reconstruction. Finally, the article concludes by noting some current work by Leitgeb that aims to develop and update some aspects of the Aufbau project for contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

In his carefully argued and extensively researched article “The Implications of Recent Work in the History of Analytic Philosophy” (Preston 2005a) Aaron Preston has raised what should surely be the central methodological issue for Russell studies and the history of analytic philosophy more generally.[1] That is, what are the goals of the history of analytic philosophy and by what means can we best try to meet these goals? Preston’s main conclusion is that historical investigation into the origins of analytic philosophy (...) has made the most common answers to these questions untenable. In particular, we are encouraged to conclude that analytic philosophy is not even a genuine philosophical movement, and is in this sense “illusory”. For Preston, then, the history of analytic philosophy should reconcile itself to this fact and adjust its methods dramatically. Once we see that analytic philosophy, as traditionally conceived, never existed, then we are free to apply tools not usually deployed in the history of philosophy, e.g. memetics (Preston 2005b). (shrink)

This paper explores the conditions under which scientists are warranted in adding the one-dimensional heat equation to their theories and then using the equation to describe particular physical situations. Summarizing these derivation and application conditions motivates an account of idealized scientific representation that relates the use of mathematics in science to interpretative questions about scientific theories.

Christopher Pincock, Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA This volume presents seventeen essays (not eleven, as the publisher inexplicably claims) by a diverse group of philosophers that arose out of a conference in Florence in 1999. As its title indicates, the focus of the conference was the contemporary significance of the topics, methods and innovations of the logical empiricists. This has led to a nicely balanced collection that combines careful historical study with an eye on (...) current debates in the philosophy of science and mind. (shrink)

Christopher Pincock April 24, 2006 My goal in reviewing Soames’ book was to help readers of this journal evaluate his contribution to the history of analytic philosophy, with a special focus on his discussion of Russell.[1] Soames charges both that I misrepresent the contents of his book and that I make mistakes in the interpretation of various aspects of Russell’s philosophy. If I had committed any errors of the former sort, I would certainly apologize and thank Soames for bringing (...) such a mistake to my attention. After explaining why I do not believe I have misrepresented the contents of his book, I will turn to the one substantive issue that he raises in his reply, namely the need for unperceived sense-data in Russell’s external world program. While disagreement here is more understandable, nothing Soames says in his book or in his reply has led me to revise my original remarks. (shrink)

Forthcoming, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Abstract: The epistemic problem of assessing the support that some evidence confers on a hypothesis is considered using an extended example from the history of meteorology. In this case, and presumably in others, the problem is to develop techniques of data analysis that will link the sort of evidence that can be collected to hypotheses of interest. This problem is solved by applying mathematical tools to structure the data and connect it (...) to the competing hypotheses. I conclude that mathematical innovations provide crucial epistemic links between evidence and theories precisely because the evidence and theories are mathematically described. (shrink)

This paper presents two different kinds a priori entitlements and argues that both are necessary to account for scientific knowledge. On the one hand, there are formal a priori entitlements whose existence is grounded in conditions on concept possession. On the other hand, there are material a priori entitlements that an agent accrues in virtue of practical reasoning. The discussion aims to reconcile the strengths of Christopher Peacocke’s and Michael Friedman’s recent work on the a priori, while overcoming the weaknesses (...) of their respective proposals. (shrink)

Many philosophers would concede that mathematics contributes to the abstractness of some of our most successful scientific representations. Still, it is hard to know what this abstractness really comes to or how to make a link between abstractness and success. I start by explaining how mathematics can increase the abstractness of our representations by distinguishing two kinds of abstractness. First, there is an abstract representation that eschews causal content. Second, there are families of representations with a common mathematical core that (...) is variously interpreted. The second part of the paper makes a connection between both kinds of abstractness and success by emphasizing confirmation. That is, I will argue that the mathematics contributes to the confirmation of these abstract scientific representations. This can happen in two ways which I label "direct" and "indirect". The contribution is direct when the mathematics facilitates the confirmation of an accurate representation, while the contribution is indirect when it helps the process of disconfirming an inaccurate representation. Establishing this conclusion helps to explain why mathematics is prevalent in some of our successful scientific theories, but I should emphasize that this is just one piece of a fairly daunting puzzle. (shrink)

Example: which mathematical truths concerning the real numbers play a role in using real numbers to represent temperature? “temperature and other scalar fields used in physics are assumed to be continuous, and this guarantees that if point x has temperature ψ(x) and point z has temperature ψ(z) and r is a real number between ψ(x) and ψ(z), then there will be a point y spatio-temporally between x and z such that ψ(y ) = r ” (Field 1980, 57).

In her preface to this collection of 11 new essays on Ramsey, Frápolli clarifies the nonhistorical orientation of the volume: ‘Our way of honoring Ramsey has been to think with him and, wherever possible, to go beyond that, putting his ideas to work and seeing how far they can reach’ (ix). This certainly makes sense for the topics of many of these essays, building as they do on Ramsey’s rich contributions to economics and reliabilist epistemology as well as on his (...) suggestive proposals about truth, pragmatism and the content of scientific theories. Unfortunately, such an orientation leads to mixed results for the four essays that squarely focus on Ramsey’s philosophy of logic and mathematics. Here Ramsey’s contemporary significance is more debatable and the most fertile mathematical innovation that Ramsey offered, namely ‘Ramsey theory’, is not noted by the contributors to this volume. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:82 Reviews c:\users\arlene\documents\rj issues\type3501\rj 3501 061 red.docx 2015-07-10 4:07 PM LOGICISM BEYOND PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA Chris Pincock Philosophy / Ohio State U. Columbus, oh 43210–1365, usa pincock[email protected] William Demopoulos. Logicism and Its Philosophical Legacy. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2013. Pp. xii, 272. isbn: 9781107029804.£60.00; us$104.99 (hb). his book brings together eight previously published essays along with three new essays and a brief introduction. In one way or (...) another, each essay pursues either logicism or some broader implication of logicism that a major figure like Russell or Carnap explored. In a narrow sense, logicism is just the position that grounds the concepts and claims of arithmetic (or all of mathematics) in logic. However, in Demopoulos’ hands, logicism becomes a project of much greater significance. A note added to Chapter 5, the classic 1985 article “Bertrand Russell’s The Analysis of Matter” (co-authored with Michael Friedman), indicates this broader scope and Demopoulos’ own take on logicism. Originally Demopoulos and Friedman had concluded their article with both the observation that there are serious “intellectual tensions produced by logicism’s attempt to account for both pure mathematics and applied mathematics (mathematical physics)” and the pessimistic conclusion that “it appears that we can account for the distinctive character of the one only at the expense of the other” (p. 107). Now Demopoulos indicates that even though “something close to [this] is true of Carnap’s Ramsey-sentence q= Reviews 83 c:\users\arlene\documents\rj issues\type3501\rj 3501 061 red.docx 2015-07-10 4:07 PM reconstruction of the language of science”, “the four previous chapters are an extended argument against” the earlier conjecture. For Demopoulos, the main problem is to make sense of both pure and applied mathematics in something like the original logicist form found in Frege, Russell and Carnap.The solution to this problem arises only when we have pinpointed exactly where these logicist projects failed and how their failures can be overcome. Chapter 1 focuses on Frege and his logicism for arithmetic. Demopoulos’ main contention is that Frege aims to reduce arithmetic to logic in order to demonstrate the autonomy of arithmetic from geometric intuition and empirical experience. Frege’s worry about intuition is not motivated by scepticism or by a concern about the cogency of our knowledge of arithmetic (p. 11).The point of logicism is to free arithmetic from the obscurity associated with intuition and to get a clearer grasp of the generality that is characteristic of arithmetic. (Chapters 8 and 9 develop this point in more detail and use it to motivate a brand of logicism for arithmetic that is taken to improve on current neo-Fregean approaches.) For this reason Hume’s Principle takes a central role in Frege’s reconstruction of arithmetic for it not only establishes the autonomy of arithmetic, but also secures the core use of arithmetic in application, i.e. in counting (p. 19). Unlike Dummett and other commentators Demopoulos does not think that this aspect of Frege’s logicism is flawed. Instead, flaws arise only with the accounts of applied mathematics offered by later figures like Russell and Carnap.The root of these problems is that they extend a particular logicist strategy to other areas of mathematics, such as geometry, and to our scientific knowledge more generally. Chapter 2 considers “Carnap’sThesis”, which Demopoulos summarizes as “the assertion that certain applied mathematical theories are not factual” (p. 28). Although the thesis is clearly central to Carnap throughout his career, Demopoulos ultimately argues for a non-Carnapian basis for the factual/nonfactual distinction.The root of the difference is the kind of criteria of identity that are appropriate for the objects at the heart of the theory: … the factuality of an applied mathematical theory will be shown to turn on the recognition that the criteria of identity appropriate to its objects are empirically constrained in a way that the criteria of identity appropriate to the objects of a nonfactual theory are not. (P. 28) For arithmetic, the natural numbers associated with two sortal concepts are identical just in case the objects that... (shrink)

This is my response to the papers by Chris Pincock, Lisa Warenski and Jonathan Weinberg, which were presented at the Book Symposium on my Essays on A Priori Knowledge and Justification, American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meetings, March 16–19, 2014.

Just as theory of representation is deficient if it can’t explain how misrepresentation is possible, a theory of computation is deficient if it can’t explain how miscomputation is possible. Nonetheless, philosophers have generally ignored miscomputation. My primary goal in this paper is to clarify both what miscomputation is and how to adequately explain it. Miscomputation is a special kind of malfunction: a system miscomputes when it computes in a way that it shouldn’t. To explain miscomputation, you must provide accounts of (...) computational behavior, computational norms, and how computational behavior can deviate from computational norms. A secondary goal of this paper is to defend an (quasi-)individualist, mechanistic theory of miscomputation. Computational behavior is narrowly individuated. Computational norms are widely individuated. A system miscomputes when its behavior manifests a narrow computational structure that the widely individuated norms say that it should not have. (shrink)

Mathematics plays a central role in much of contemporary science, but philosophers have struggled to understand what this role is or how significant it might be for mathematics and science. In this book Christopher Pincock tackles this perennial question in a new way by asking how mathematics contributes to the success of our best scientific representations. In the first part of the book this question is posed and sharpened using a proposal for how we can determine the content of (...) a scientific representation. Several different sorts of contributions from mathematics are then articulated. Pincock argues that each contribution can be understood as broadly epistemic, so that what mathematics ultimately contributes to science is best connected with our scientific knowledge. In the second part of the book, Pincock critically evaluates alternative approaches to the role of mathematics in science. These include the potential benefits for scientific discovery and scientific explanation. A major focus of this part of the book is the indispensability argument for mathematical platonism. Using the results of part one, Pincock argues that this argument can at best support a weak form of realism about the truth-value of the statements of mathematics. The book concludes with a chapter on pure mathematics and the remaining options for making sense of its interpretation and epistemology. Thoroughly grounded in case studies drawn from scientific practice, this book aims to bring together current debates in both the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science and to demonstrate the philosophical importance of applications of mathematics. (shrink)

A timely, well-grounded analysis that reveals an inconvenient truth: we can't save capitalism and save the planet.

International Political Theory focuses on the point where two fields of study meet - International Relations and Political Theory. It takes from the former a central concern with the 'international' broadly defined; from the latter it takes a broadly normative identity. IPT studies the 'ought' questions that have been ignored or side-lined by the modern study of International Relations and the 'international' dimension that Political Theory has in the past neglected. A central proposition of IPT is that the 'domestic' and (...) the 'international' cannot be treated as self-contained spheres, although this does not preclude states and the states-system from being regarded by some practitioners of IPT as central points of reference. This Handbook provides an authoritative account of the issues, debates, and perspectives in the field, guided by two basic questions concerning its purposes and methods of inquiry. First, how does IPT connect with real world politics? In particular, how does it engage with real world problems, and position itself in relation to the practices of real world politics? And second, following on from this, what is the relationship between IPT and empirical research in international relations? This Handbook showcases the distinctive and valuable contribution of normative inquiry not just for its own sake but also in addressing real world problems. The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a twelve-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub-fields of International Relations. The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-Smith of the University of Queensland and Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford, with each volume edited by a distinguished pair of specialists in their respective fields. The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship and reshapes it, pushing each sub-field in challenging new directions. Following the example of the original Reus-Smit and Snidal The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, each volume is organized around a strong central thematic by a pair of scholars drawn from alternative perspectives, reading its sub-field in an entirely new way, and pushing scholarship in challenging new directions. (shrink)

The authors survey some debates about the nature and structure of physical theories and about the connections between our physical theories and naturalized metaphysics. The discussion is organized around an “ideal view” of physical theories and criticisms that can be raised against it. This view includes controversial commitments regarding the best analysis of physical modalities and intertheory relations. The authors consider the case in favor of taking laws as the primary modal notion, discussing objections related to alleged violations of the (...) laws, the apparent need to appeal to causality, and the status of probability. The “ideal view” includes a commitment that fundamental physical theories are explanatorily sufficient. The authors discuss several challenges to recovering the manifest image from fundamental physics, along with a distinct challenge to reductionism based on acknowledging the contributions of less fundamental theories in physical explanations. (shrink)

"Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference" looks at the question of difference across the full spectrum of feminist theory from liberal, radical, lesbian ...

Recent clinical trials show that psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin can be given safely in controlled conditions, and can cause lasting psychological benefits with one or two administrations. Supervised psychedelic sessions can reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, and addiction, and improve well-being in healthy volunteers, for months or even years. But these benefits seem to be mediated by "mystical" experiences of cosmic consciousness, which prompts a philosophical concern: do psychedelics cause psychological benefits by inducing false or implausible beliefs about (...) the metaphysical nature of reality? This book is the first scholarly monograph in English devoted to the philosophical analysis of psychedelic drugs. Its central focus is the apparent conflict between the growing use of psychedelics in psychiatry and the philosophical worldview of naturalism. Within the book, Letheby integrates empirical evidence and philosophical considerations in the service of a simple conclusion: this "Comforting Delusion Objection" to psychedelic therapy fails. While exotic metaphysical ideas do sometimes come up, they are not, on closer inspection, the central driver of change in psychedelic therapy. Psychedelics lead to lasting benefits by altering the sense of self, and changing how people relate to their own minds and lives-not by changing their beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality. The upshot is that a traditional conception of psychedelics as agents of insight and spirituality can be reconciled with naturalism (the philosophical position that the natural world is all there is). Controlled psychedelic use can lead to genuine forms of knowledge gain and spiritual growth-even if no Cosmic Consciousness or transcendent divine Reality exists. Philosophy of Psychedelics is an indispensable guide to the literature for researchers already engaged in the field of psychedelic psychiatry, and for researchers-especially philosophers-who want to become acquainted with this increasingly topical field. (shrink)

Using a vague predicate can make commitments about the appropriate use of that predicate in the remaining part of the discourse. For instance, if I assert that some particular pig is fat, I am committed to judging any fatter pig to be fat as well. We can model this update effect by recognizing that truth depends both on the state of the world and on the state of the discourse: the truth conditions of ‘This pig is fat’ rule out evaluation (...) points for which the pig in question in world w is thinner than the cutoff for fatness in the discourse d. Then disagreements about taste are disagreements about the discourse. Unlike disagreements about the world, disagreements about the discourse can be faultless, given that none of the discourse participants has privileged authority to make pronouncements about conventions for appropriate use of a predicate. Thus on the dynamic view developed here, whether or not a dispute about taste turns out to be faultless depends in part on predictable features of the previous discourse. On this account, faultless disagreement involving predicates of personal taste does not force relativizing truth to a judge or assessor. (shrink)

This article focuses on a case that expert practitioners count as an explanation: a mathematical account of Plateau’s laws for soap films. I argue that this example falls into a class of explanations that I call abstract explanations.explanations involve an appeal to a more abstract entity than the state of affairs being explained. I show that the abstract entity need not be causally relevant to the explanandum for its features to be explanatorily relevant. However, it remains unclear how to unify (...) abstract and causal explanations as instances of a single sort of thing. I conclude by examining the implications of the claim that explanations require objective dependence relations. If this claim is accepted, then there are several kinds of objective dependence relations. 1 Introduction2 A Case3 Abstract and Causal Explanations4 Recent Work on Mathematical Explanation5 Explanation and Dependence6 Conclusion. (shrink)

What is the nature of deep disagreement? In this paper, I consider two similar albeit seemingly rival answers to this question: the Wittgensteinian theory, according to which deep disagreements are disagreements over hinge propositions, and the fundamental epistemic principle theory, according to which deep disagreements are disagreements over fundamental epistemic principles. I assess these theories against a set of desiderata for a satisfactory theory of deep disagreement, and argue that while the fundamental epistemic principle theory does better than the Wittgensteinian (...) theory on this score, the fundamental epistemic principle theory nevertheless struggles to explain the variety of deep disagreement. (shrink)

Users of psychedelic drugs often report that their sense of being a self or ‘I’ distinct from the rest of the world has diminished or altogether dissolved. Neuroscientific study of such ‘ego dissolution’ experiences offers a window onto the nature of self-awareness. We argue that ego dissolution is best explained by an account that explains self-awareness as resulting from the integrated functioning of hierarchical predictive models which posit the existence of a stable and unchanging entity to which representations are bound. (...) Combining recent work on the ‘integrative self' and the phenomenon of self-binding with predictive processing principles yields an explanation of ego dissolution according to which self-representation is a useful Cartesian fiction: an ultimately false representation of a simple and enduring substance to which attributes are bound which serves to integrate and unify cognitive processing across levels and domains. The self-model is not a mere narrative posit, as some have suggested; it has a more robust and ubiquitous cognitive function than that. But this does not mean, as others have claimed, that the self-model has the right attributes to qualify as a self. It performs some of the right kinds of functions, but it is not the right kind of entity. Ego dissolution experiences reveal that the self-model plays an important binding function in cognitive processing, but the self does not exist. (shrink)

This book takes concepts developed by researchers in theoretical computer science and adapts and applies them to the study of natural language meaning. Summarizing over a decade of research, Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan put forward the Continuation Hypothesis: that the meaning of a natural language expression can depend on its own continuation.

Philosophers often treat racist and sexist slurs as a special sort of puzzle. What is the difference between a slur and its correlates? In attempting to answer this question, a second distinction has been overlooked: that between slurs and insults. What makes a term count as a slur? This is not an unnecessary taxonomical question as long as ableist terms such as ‘moron’ are dismissed as mere insults. Attempts to resolve the insult/slur distinction by considering the communicative content of slurs (...) are not promising. A better solution is offered by speech act theory, and this paper develops a novel way to describe ordinary slurring utterances as oppressive speech acts. This can both explain the difference between slurs and insults, and challenge the dismissal of ableist terms. (shrink)

If dangerous climate change is to be avoided, it is vital that carbon sinks such as tropical rainforests are protected. But protecting them has costs. These include opportunity costs: the potential economic benefits which those who currently control rainforests have to give up when they are protected. But who should bear those costs? Should countries which happen to have rainforests within their territories sacrifice their own economic development, because of our broader global interests in protecting key carbon sinks? This essay (...) develops an argument from the “principle of fairness,” which seeks to establish that outsiders should pay states with rainforests so as to share the costs of protection. If they do not, they can be condemned for free-riding on forest states. The argument is, I suggest, compelling and also capable of enjoying support from adherents of a wide variety of positions on global justice. (shrink)

Struggles over precious resources such as oil, water, and land are increasingly evident in the contemporary world. States, indigenous groups, and corporations vie to control access to those resources, and the benefits they provide. These conflicts are rapidly spilling over into new arenas, such as the deep oceans and the Polar regions. How should these precious resources be governed, and how should the benefits and burdens they generate be shared? Justice and Natural Resources provides a systematic theory of natural resource (...) justice. It argues that we should use the benefits and burdens flowing from these resources to promote greater equality across the world, and share governance over many important resources. At the same time, the book takes seriously the ways in which particular resources can matter in peoples lives. It provides invaluable guidance on a series of pressing issues, including the scope of state resource rights, the claims of indigenous communities, rights over ocean resources, the burdens of conservation, and the challenges of climate change and transnational resource governance. It will be required reading for anyone interested in natural resource governance, climate politics, and global justice. (shrink)

This paper explores the application of hinge epistemology to deep disagreement. Hinge epistemology holds that there is a class of commitments—hinge commitments—which play a fundamental role in the structure of belief and rational evaluation: they are the most basic general ‘presuppositions’ of our world views which make it possible for us to evaluate certain beliefs or doubts as rational. Deep disagreements seem to crucially involve disagreements over such fundamental commitments. In this paper, I consider pessimism about deep disagreement, the thesis (...) that such disagreements are rationally irresolvable, and ask whether the Wittgensteinian account of deep disagreement—according to which such disagreements are disagreements over hinge commitments—provides adequate support for pessimism. I argue that the answer to this question depends on what hinge commitments are and what our epistemic relation to them is supposed to be. I argue for two core claims. First, that non-epistemic theories of hinge commitments provide adequate support for pessimism. Nevertheless, such theories have highly implausible consequences in the context of deep disagreement. Secondly, at least one epistemic theory of hinge commitments, the entitlement theory, permits optimism about such disagreements. As such, while hinge epistemology is mainly pessimistic about deep disagreement, it doesn’t have to be. (shrink)

An Introduction to Philosophical Methods is the first book to survey the various methods that philosophers use to support their views. Rigorous yet accessible, the book introduces and illustrates the methodological considerations that are involved in current philosophical debates. Where there is controversy, the book presents the case for each side, but highlights where the key difficulties with them lie. While eminently student-friendly, the book makes an important contribution to the debate regarding the acceptability of the various philosophical methods, and (...) so it will also be of interest to more experienced philosophers. (shrink)

This paper explores the application of hinge epistemology to deep disagreement. Hinge epistemology holds that there is a class of commitments—hinge commitments—which play a fundamental role in the structure of belief and rational evaluation: they are the most basic general ‘presuppositions’ of our world views which make it possible for us to evaluate certain beliefs or doubts as rational. Deep disagreements seem to crucially involve disagreements over such fundamental commitments. In this paper, I consider pessimism about deep disagreement, the thesis (...) that such disagreements are rationally irresolvable, and ask whether the Wittgensteinian account of deep disagreement—according to which such disagreements are disagreements over hinge commitments—provides adequate support for pessimism. I argue that the answer to this question depends on what hinge commitments are and what our epistemic relation to them is supposed to be. I argue for two core claims. First, that non-epistemic theories of hinge commitments provide adequate support for pessimism. Nevertheless, such theories have highly implausible consequences in the context of deep disagreement. Secondly, at least one epistemic theory of hinge commitments, the entitlement theory, permits optimism about such disagreements. As such, while hinge epistemology is mainly pessimistic about deep disagreement, it doesn’t have to be. (shrink)

Some disagreements concern our most fundamental beliefs, principles, values, or worldviews, such as those about the existence of God, society and politics, or the trustworthiness of science. These are ‘deep disagreements’. But what exactly are deep disagreements? This paper critically overviews theories of deep disagreement. It does three things. First, it explains the differences between deep and other kinds of disagreement, including peer, persistent, and widespread disagreement. Second, it critically overviews two mainstream theories of deep disagreement, the Wittgensteinian account and (...) the Fundamental Epistemic Principle account, before introducing a Hybrid account. Finally, it explores the notion that deep disagreements can be deeper than others. (shrink)

In a comprehensive and innovative reassessment of the discipline, this book argues that classical and contemporary social theories must be studied in relation to the ambition that shaped and established sociology: the ambition to comprehend the relationship between social and moral life. Surveying a range of sociological analyses from Comte to feminism, postmodernism and rational choice theory, this book examines the various attempts that have been made to reconstruct the discipline over the last century, and the challenges facing it today. (...) The book situates sociology in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts and examines how the founders of the discipline developed competing analyses of the processes elementary to social and moral life through their distinctive sociological contributions. Individual chapters examine `Human Sociology', `Sacred Sociology', `Tragic Sociology', `Heroic Sociology' and `Normative Sociology'. The book moves on to discuss post-classical thought, and the attempted reconstruction of the subject. Separate chapters are devoted to `Conflict Sociology', `Feminist Sociology', `Racial Sociology', `Rational Sociology' and `Post//Modern Sociology'. The result is a landmark work in recent sociological study. Accomplished, erudite and alive with ideas, the book will be required reading for students of sociology, social theory, religious studies and cultural studies. (shrink)