Tensions Regarding Epistemic Concepts The paper argues that there is no logic of scientific discovery, but there is an inference-like pattern that we can model as a "logic," retrospectively, once a discovery has been successfully made. While accepting a kind of epistemological pluralism and opportunism, the claim will be advocated that a convergent and reasonably wide-ranging normative "logic" might be constructed, one that might even work reasonably well in selected applications and might also lead us to make congruent judgments of (...) irrationality or illogicality wherever it seems not to yield the "normatively appropriate" outcomes in otherwise comparable specimen cases. (shrink)

Toward the close of the nineteenth century, just as American pragmatism began to approach its classic form, Frederick Jackson Turner penned what was to become the single most famous definition of the American character. In the lead essay of his book The Frontier in American History, Turner tells us that "the frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization". What he means is that the idea of the frontier—not the confrontation of slavery or the experience of European colonization—was (...) the most significant factor in the formation of what has come to be seen as uniquely American.By "frontier," Turner means that curious zone in which "wilderness" and "civilization" meet and exercise a. (shrink)

O presente artigo reflete sobre os argumentos propostos por Charles Sanders Peirce em sua conhecida VII Conferência de Cambridge, proferida em 1898, sob o título “Hábito”, na qual justifica a sua posição acerca de como seria possível explicar a origem do universo através de uma filosofia de caráter genético. Essa explicação toma, no interior de seu complexo sistema arquitetônico de pensamento, a tendência à aquisição de hábitos como o princípio explicativo fulcral sobre a origem e a evolução das Leis da (...) Natureza. Peirce adota tal princípio como aquele que sustentaria uma afinidade entre mente e matéria. (shrink)