Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for crosscultural communication at large. This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms (...) of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts. (shrink)

Eseji su nastali u 2003. i 2004. godini kao dio realizacije mojih istraživanja holizma identiteta i socijalne triangulacije (identitet - znanje - društvena ontologija) tokom rada na istraživačkim projektima Znanstveno-raziskovalneg središča Republike Slovenije, Koper. Istovremeno je rad na projektima u Sarajevu, u sklopu međunarodnih i domaćih aktivnosti koje je organiziralo Filozofsko društvo "Theoria ", bio poticajan za promišljanje nekih značajnih pitanja koja se odnose na rearanžiranje ambijenta životnog svijeta modernog čovjeka.

Quine is routinely perceived as having changed his mind about the scope of the Duhem-Quine thesis, shifting from what has been called an 'extreme holism' to a more moderate view. Where the Quine of 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' argues that “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (1951, 42), the later Quine seems to back away from this “needlessly strong statement of holism” (1991, 393). In this paper, I show that the received view is incorrect. I distinguish (...) three ways in which Quine's early holism can be said to be wide-scoped and show that he has never changed his mind about any one of these aspects of his early view. Instead, I argue that Quine's apparent change of mind can be explained away as a mere shift of emphasis. (shrink)

In the present article, working from within the framework of critical rationalism and focusing mostly on the views developed by some Iranian writers, I argue that the programmes of producing ‘Islamic Science’ and ‘Islamisation of Science/Knowledge’ are doomed to failure. I develop my arguments in three parts. I start by explaining that the advocates of the programmes of producing cIS or IoK subscribe to mistaken images of science that are shaped by either a positivist or outmoded culturalist/interpretivist theories of science. (...) I shall then focus on the similarities and differences of ‘science’ and ‘technology’, arguing that despite close interconnection between the two it is of utmost importance, for analytical purposes, to keep these two socially constructed entities apart. Drawing on the above distinction, I argue that while creating ‘Islamic’ or ‘indigenous’ sciences is impossible, constructing ‘Islamic’ or ‘indigenous’ technologies is, in principle, feasible. Lastly, I turn to some of the... (shrink)

Hilary Putnam once proposed a semantic approach to, as well as a deflationist resolution of, the problem of analyticity. I take up and defend both ideas. First of all, I defend Putnam's semantic construal of the issue against Quine's reductive understanding. Secondly, I devise a semantics that successfully explains the genesis of the relevant analytic truths and that shows them to be harmless. Finally, I rebut the aspirations of the neo-descriptivist semantics, prominently propounded by David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, that (...) is widely presumed to spearhead the re-establishment of substantial analyticities. I conclude that analytic truths—at least those discussed—are indeed harmless. (shrink)

A Constructivist Foundation of the Objects of Scientific Empirical Theories. The following considerations are guided by the assumption that the objects of any scientific empirical theory are constructs as well as the theories themselves, the construction of these object-constructs being fundamentally dependent on the theories' functioning in the provision of practically relevant empirical explanations. The relevance of these explanations consists in their contribution to the improvement of at least one practical capacity through enabling the invention of at least one improving (...) kind of practical actions. In an excursus on the origination and the development of the notion of theory within human history the view is held, in contrast to Aristotle, that theorization has always aimed at practical relevance, however in a broader sense of "practical" than that in which Aristotle uses the term "πρακτικός", and that only the practical functions of theory-construction have changed over the times, and their object-constructs correspondingly. The latest form of theory with the above-mentioned function in the development of social practice is the scientific explanatory empirical theory with the descriptive empirical theory now no longer fulfilling a practical function of its own, but only a service-function of data acquisition for the explanatory theory. The object-constructs of strictly scientific empirical theories in the sense of explanatory theories for the improvement of practical capacities are here considered to be empirical quasi-actions, those of the dependent descriptive empirical theories either quasi-instruments or quasi-products or quasi-materials of the respective kind of quasi-actions of the explanatory theory. The empirical quasi-action is here conceived as the latest in a sequence of developing object-constructs that have resulted from different and successively more effective attempts at better survival of human beings and even from prehuman stages of evolution. The author envisages a differentiation of empirical quasi-actions into further sub-categories to provide the conceptual bases for the construction of objects of new kinds of scientific explanatory empirical theories that might become practically relevant for the improvement of new kinds of practical capacities to be preferably improved for the advancement of social practice: Beside the already relevant category of empirical processes (as I named it) are here proposed the further categories of empirical originations of meaning and of empirical originations of practical actions as conceptual bases for object-constructs of future scientific empirical theories. (shrink)

The origins of the ‘ incommensurability problem’ and its central aspect, the ‘ meaning variance thesis’ are traced to the successive collapse of several distinctions maintained by the standard empiricist account of meaning in scientific theories. The crucial distinction is that between a conceptual structure and a theory. The ‘thesis’ and the ‘problem’ follow from critiques of this distinction by Duhem, Quine and Feyerabend. It is maintained that, rather than revealing the ‘problem’, the arguments leading to it simply show the (...) inadequacy of the reductionist theory of meaning. The genuine remaining problem is that of the development of a new theory of meaning in science. (shrink)

Man kann die Unterscheidung zwischen synthetischen und analytischen Sätzen aus zwei Perspektiven betrachten – von innen oder von außen: mit Blick auf die eigene Sprache oder mit Blick auf die Sprache anderer. Wer die Außenperspektive einnimmt, sucht eine Antwort auf die deskriptive Frage, welche Sätze einer fremden Sprache als analytisch zu klassifizieren sind. Wer die Innenperspektive einnimmt, sucht dagegen eine Antwort auf folgende normative Frage: Welche Sätze darf ich nicht preisgeben oder zurückweisen – wenn ich keinen Unfug reden will? Die (...) beiden Blickwinkel schließen einander nicht aus; sie ergänzen sich und unterstützen einander. In seinem Aufsatz „Two dogmas of empiricism“ kritisiert Quine die Unterscheidung zwischen synthetischen und analytischen Sätzen aus der Innenperspektive; in seinem Buch Word and object wiederholt er dieselbe Kritik aus der Außenperspektive. In beiden Fällen richtet sich seine Kritik gegen die Ziele des frühen Carnap (der sämtliche Ausdrücke der Wissenschaftssprache mithilfe analytisch wahrer Definitionen verständlich machen wollte). Ich trete beiden Fassungen dieser Kritik entgegen und schlage zwei Definitionen des Begriffs vom analytischen Satz vor, die Quines Kritik entgehen: eine Definition aus der Außen- und eine aus der Innenperspektive. Zum Abschluss führe ich in einer leicht spekulativen Betrachtung vor, wie man bloßen Begriffswandel vom Wandel der inhaltlichen Überzeugungen trennen könnte – und zwar sogar im Fall wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the nature of the relation between meaning-interdependence and analyticity. The theory within which meaning-interdependence reaches its peak and becomes omnipresent is meaning holism, according to which every two expressions are meaning-interdependent. A lot of people reject holism partially due to the impression that the theory leads to the picture in which language is self-sufficient in the sense that it is nothing but a game of meanings which is detached from reality. What stands behind that impression (...) is probably something along the lines: analyticity stems from meaning-interdependence, so if all expressions are meaning-interdependent, then everything appears analytic. I defend holism from this kind of objection. I start with showing that analyticity traditionally understood cannot pour over language within holism, because it is not applicable to the theory at all. Then, I argue that adopting some weaker notion of analyticity leads to the ubiquity of analyticity indeed, but analyticity so understood is too weak to actually endanger holism. Finally, I demonstrate that the problems with analyticity appear only when meaning-interdependence is treated in extremely superficial way. I also propose a very simple hierarchy of meaning-interdependence, based on Pagin’s total-pair holism, which immediately repeal the ‘ubiquitous analyticity’ problem. (shrink)

What does it take for Islam and science to engage in a genuine conversation with each other? This essay is an attempt to answer this question by clarifying the conditions which make having such a conversation possible and plausible. I will first distinguish between three notions of conversation: the trivial conversation (which requires sharing a common language and the meaning of its ordinary expressions), superficial conversation (in which although the language is shared, the communicators fail to share the meaning of (...) their theoretical terms), and genuine conversation (which implies sharing the language and the meaning of ordinary as well as theoretical terms). I will then argue that our real concern with regard to the exchange between Islam and science is to be to specify the conditions under which their proponents can engage in a genuine conversation with each other and that such a conversation to take place essentially requires sharing a common ontology. Following Quine, I will argue that Muslims, like the followers of any religion, would have no other choice but to work from within science. Doing so, however, would not prevent Muslims from having a genuine conversation with the proponents of other worldviews because when the shared ontology fails to offer any potentially testable answer to our remaining questions about the world, the Islamic viewpoint can appear as a genuine alternative among other underdetermined ones, deciding between which would be a matter of pragmatic criteria. (shrink)

In a couple of short papers, Donald Davidson holds that a creature cannot think unless it is the interpreter of the speech of another. At first blush, speaking a language is, therefore, a necessary condition for thought. His controversial claims has led many to regard him as a follower of the Cartesian tradition wherein languageless creatures are nothing but mindless machines. Against this widely shared interpretation, in this paper we put forward a more charitable interpretation of Davidson’s claims. According to (...) our reading, Davidson never meant to argue that languageless creatures do not think. Instead, the only thing his arguments purport to show is that one will never be in a position to confirm that they do. This paper consists of a defense of the idea that Davidson is better seen as endorsing radical skepticism as to whether languageless creatures think. (shrink)

The thesis evaluates a contemporary debate concerning the very possibility of thinking about the world. In the first chapter, McDowell's critique of Davidson is presented, focusing on the coherentism defended by the latter. The critique of the myth of the given (as it appears in Sellars and Wittgenstein), as well as the necessity of a minimal empiricism (which McDowell finds in Quine and Kant), lead to an oscillation in contemporary thinking between two equally unsatisfactory ways of understanding the empirical content (...) of thought. In the second chapter, I defend Davidson's approach, focusing on his theory of interpretation and semantic externalism, as well as on the relation between causes and reasons. In the third chapter, the debate is analyzed in more detail. I criticize the anomalous monism, the way in which the boundaries between the conceptual and the non-conceptual are understood by Davidson, as well as the naturalized Platonism defended by McDowell. This thesis is mainly negative, and it concludes by revealing problems in both positions under evaluation. (shrink)

“Naturalized epistemology” is a recent attempt to transform the theory of knowledge into a branch of natural science. Traditional epistemologists object to this proposal on the grounds that it eliminates the distinctively philosophical content of epistemology. In this thesis, I argue that traditional philosophers are justified in their reluctance to accept naturalism, but that their ongoing inability to refute it points to deeper problems inherent in traditional epistemology. I establish my thesis first by critiquing three versions of naturalism, showing that (...) each version either fails to implement its objectives consistently or starts from dubious objectives. “Optimistic naturalism” attempts to use naturalistic methods to give positive answers to traditional epistemological questions (such as by affirming that our beliefs can be justified). This fails because the form of traditional questions requires the concept “belief,” a concept that I argue naturalistic methodology cannot countenance (because of the severe constraints of naturalistic semantic theory). “Pessimistic naturalism,” the version advocated by Quine, is more consistent with naturalistic methodology, but fails because hidden behind its conclusions are assumptions (such as the underdetermination thesis) that cannot themselves be naturalized in the full context of scientific evidence. A final attempt to naturalize epistemology, deflationary naturalism, dispenses with traditional questions entirely, urging that the terms “knowledge” and “justification” be taken as mere pragmatic devices whose use can, nevertheless, be studied scientifically. Curiously, this view fails to take account of important facts about the actual use of those terms, as studied by psychologists. In the end, despite problems with each of these versions, traditional philosophers can learn something from their encounter with naturalism. In the course of showing how various naturalistic doctrines cannot themselves be naturalized, I identify the flaws in traditional epistemology (such as its reliance on a priorism, and its resulting inability to articulate a workable empirical foundationalist theory of justification) that make naturalism harder to challenge. These flaws must be corrected if philosophers are to preserve the autonomy of their discipline. (shrink)