I defend the Received View on scientific theories as developed by Carnap, Hempel, and Feigl against a number of criticisms based on misconceptions. First, I dispute the claim that the Received View demands axiomatizations in first order logic, and the further claim that these axiomatizations must include axioms for the mathematics used in the scientific theories. Next, I contend that models are important according to the Received View. Finally, I argue against the claim that the Received View is intended to (...) make the concept of a theory more precise. Rather, it is meant as a generalizable framework for explicating specific theories. (shrink)

Quine famously holds that "philosophy is continuous with natural science". In order to find out what exactly the point of this claim is, I take up one of his preferred phrases and trace it through his writings, i.e., the phrase "Science itself teaches that …". Unlike Wittgenstein, Quine did not take much interest in determining what might be distinctive of philosophical investigations, or of the philosophical part of scientific investigations. I find this indifference regrettable, and I take a fresh look (...) at Quine's metaphilosophy, trying to defuse his avowed naturalism by illustrating how little influence his naturalistic rhetoric has on the way he actually does philosophy. (shrink)

[First paragraph:] Part of the point of this article is to support the following claim by Adorno: “Rarely has anyone laid out a theory of philosophical clarity; instead, the concept of clarity has been used as though it were self-evident.” In fact, and again with Adorno, I shall argue for what I call the “loadedness thesis”: the thesis that philosophical conceptions of clarity are pervasively, and perhaps inevitably, philosophically partisan (section one). Yet I shall proceed to argue for a conception (...) of clarity nonetheless (section two). Such clarity I take as “default clarity,” in that, while there could be reason to eschew it, the burden of proof lies on those who would. That thought is not Adornian. But I shall consider Adorno as an attempt to discharge that burden of proof (section three). (shrink)

The advent of intelligent artificial systems has sparked a dispute about the question of who is responsible when such a system causes a harmful outcome. This paper champions the idea that this dispute should be approached as a conceptual engineering problem. Towards this claim, the paper first argues that the dispute about the responsibility gap problem is in part a conceptual dispute about the content of responsibility and related concepts. The paper then argues that the way forward is to evaluate (...) the conceptual choices we have, in the light of a systematic understanding of why the concept is important in the first place—in short, the way forward is to engage in conceptual engineering. The paper then illustrates what approaching the responsibility gap problem as a conceptual engineering problem looks like. It outlines argumentative pathways out of the responsibility gap problem and relates these to existing contributions to the dispute. (shrink)

Abstract: By focusing on contributions to the literature on function ascription, this article seeks to illustrate two problems with philosophical accounts that are presented as having descriptive aims. There is a motivational problem in that there is frequently no good reason why descriptive aims should be important, and there is a methodological problem in that the methods employed frequently fail to match the task description. This suggests that the task description as such may be the result of “default descriptivism,” a (...) tendency to take considerations that make sense of a practice to be the very considerations that generate it. Although such hypotheses are frequently quite plausible, the fact of the matter may not be very important for the pursuits of philosophers. (shrink)

Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff have argued for a view they call the ‘theory theory’: theory change in science and children are similar. While their version of the theory theory has been criticized for depending on a number of disputed claims, we argue that there is a fundamental problem which is much more basic: the theory theory is multiply ambiguous. We show that it might be claiming that a similarity holds between theory change in children and (i) individual scientists, (ii) (...) a rational reconstruction of a Superscientist, or (iii) the scientific community. We argue that (i) is false, (ii) is non-empirical (which is problematic since the theory theory is supposed to be a bold empirical hypothesis), and (iii) is either false or doesn’t make enough sense to have a truth-value. We conclude that the theory theory is an interesting failure. Its failure points the way to a full, empirical picture of scientific development, one that marries a concern with the social dynamics of science to a psychological theory of scientific cognition. (shrink)

What does the way we clarify and revise concepts reveal about the nature of concepts? This paper investigates the ontological commitments of conceptual analysis and explication regarding their supposed subject matter – concepts. It demonstrates the benefits of a cognitivist account of concepts, according to which they are not items on which the subject operates cognitively, but rather ways in which the subject operates. The proposed view helps to handle alternating references to ‘concepts’ and ‘terms’ in instructions on analysis and (...) explication. Furthermore, its virtue lies not in the capacity to render concepts ‘shareable’ but in its ontological parsimony. (shrink)

What is the true worth of Wittgenstein's contribution to philosophy? Answers to this question are strongly divided. However, most assessments rest on certain popular misreadings of his purpose. This book challenges both "theoretical" and "therapeutic" interpretations. In their place, it seeks to establish that, from beginning to end, Wittgenstein regarded clarification as the true end of philosophy. It argues that, properly understood, his approach exemplifies rather than betrays critical philosophy and provides a viable alternative to other contemporary offerings.

The problem of act individuation is a debate about the identity conditions of human acts. The fundamental question about act individuation is: how do we distinguish between actions? Three views of act individuation have dominated the literature. First, Donald Davidson and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that a number of different descriptions refer to a single act. Second, Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim have argued that each description designates a distinct act. Finally, Irving Thalberg and Judith Jarvis Thomson have averred that (...) some acts are sequences of causally related events, which include both a primitive bodily action and some of its effects. All of these accounts have assumed that a simple invariantist account of act individuation captures how ordinary people distinguish between acts. For my dissertation, I devised an experiment to test the action theorists' assumptions. My data show that people's intuitions seem to depend on the valence of the consequences of the action under consideration. So, an invariantist account is not possible. In light of the empirical results, I argue that if we seek a folk account of act individuation, then that account should be able to explain the variability that seems to be present in people's intuitions about different cases. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in intentional action has flourished in recent decades. Typically, action theorists propose necessary and sufficient conditions for a movement's being an action, conditions derived from a conceptual analysis of folk psychological action ascriptions. However, several key doctrinal and methodological features of contemporary action theory are troubling, in particular (i) the insistence that folk psychological kinds like beliefs and desires have neurophysiological correlates, (ii) the assumption that the concept of action is "classical" in structure (making it amenable to definition (...) in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for its proper application), and (iii) the assumption that deferring to intuitions about the application of the concept of action amidst the context of fantastical thought experiments furnishes an effective method for judging the adequacy of proposed analyses. After consideration of these problems it is argued that action theory needs to be reoriented in a more naturalistic direction, the methods and aims of which are continuous with those of the empirical sciences. The paper concludes with a sketch (and defense) of the methodological foundations of a naturalistic approach to intentional action. (shrink)

This dissertation consists of three parts. Part I is a defense of an artificial language methodology in philosophy and a historical and systematic defense of the logical empiricists' application of an artificial language methodology to scientific theories. These defenses provide a justification for the presumptions of a host of criteria of empirical significance, which I analyze, compare, and develop in part II. On the basis of this analysis, in part III I use a variety of criteria to evaluate the scientific (...) status of intelligent design, and further discuss confirmation, reduction, and concept formation. (shrink)