This essay reconsiders Davidson's critical attribution of the scheme‐content distinction to Quine's naturalized epistemology. It focuses on Davidson's complaint that the presence of this distinction leads Quine to mistakenly construe neural input as evidence. While committed to this distinction, Quine's epistemology does not attempt to locate a justificatory foundation in sensory experience and does not then equate neural intake with evidence. Quine's central epistemological task is an explanatory one that attempts to scientifically clarify the route from stimulus to science. (...) Davidson's critical remarks wrongly assign concerns to Quine's view that it does not have and further obscures the status of his naturalized conception of epistemology. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders Davidson's critical attribution of the scheme‐content distinction to Quine's naturalized epistemology. It focuses on Davidson's complaint that the presence of this distinction leads Quine to mistakenly construe neural input as evidence. While committed to this distinction, Quine's epistemology does not attempt to locate a justificatory foundation in sensory experience and does not then equate neural intake with evidence. Quine's central epistemological task is an explanatory one that attempts to scientifically clarify the route from stimulus to science. (...) Davidson's critical remarks wrongly assign concerns to Quine's view that it does not have and further obscures the status of his naturalized conception of epistemology. (shrink)

This article aims to defend Locke against Quine’s charge, made in his famous “two dogmas” paper, that Locke’s theory of knowledge is badly flawed, not only for assuming the dogmas, but also for adopting an “in-tolerably restrictive” version of the dogma of reductionism. It is shown here that, in his analysis of the epistemological status of scientific laws, Locke has effectively transcended the narrow idea-empiricism which un-derlies this version of reductionism. First, in order to escape idealism, he introduced (...) the notion of “sensitive knowledge of the particular existence of finite beings without us,” broadening thus his initial definition of knowledge in terms of the “perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas” — a definition compatible with Quine’s interpretation. Sec-ondly, after showing that we can have virtually no a priori knowledge of universal truths about substances, Locke extended the notion of “sensi-tive knowledge” to the particular propositions of “coexistence” in sub-stances, appealing to the notion of “probability” for treating their induc-tive generalizations and, in particular, the phenomenological laws of sci-ence. Finally, acknowledging the essential presence of hypothetical, non-phenomenological laws in science, he anticipated much of the contempo-rary views on their role and nature, including, remarkably, a mild ver-sion of the epistemological holism championed by Quine. (shrink)

The traditional epistemological problem of other minds seeks to answer the following question: how can we know someone else's mental states? The problem is often taken to be generated by a fundamental asymmetry in the means of knowledge. In my own case, I can know directly what I think and feel. This sort of self-knowledge is epistemically direct in the sense of being non-inferential and non-observational. My knowledge of other minds, however, is thought to lack these epistemic features. So (...) what is the basic source of my knowledge of other minds if I know my mind in such a way that I cannot know the minds of others? The aim of this paper is to clarify and assess the pivotal role that the asymmetry in respect of knowledge plays within a broadly inferentialist approach to the epistemological problem of other minds. The received dogma has always been to endorse the asymmetry for conceptual reasons and to insist that the idea of knowing someone else's mental life in the same way as one knows one's own mind is a complete non-starter. Against this, I aim to show that it is at best a contingent matter that creatures such as us cannot know other minds just as we know a good deal of our own minds and also that the idea of having someone else's mind in one's own introspective reach is not obviously self-contradictory. So the dogma needs to be revisited. As a result, the dialectical position of those inferentialists who believe that we know about someone else's mentality in virtue of an analogical inference will be reinforced. (shrink)

Recent work on analyticity distinguishes two kinds, metaphysical and epistemic. This paper argues that the distinction allows for a new view in the philosophy of logic according to which the claims of logic are metaphysically analytic and have distinctive modal profiles, even though their epistemology is holist and in many ways rather Quinean. It is argued that such a view combines some of the more attractive aspects of the Carnapian and Quinean approaches to logic, whilst avoiding some famous problems.

This essay is not concerned exclusively with procedure. In addition to developing and promoting an alternative methodology, I will also be utilizing it to defend, systematically, an unfashionable proposition nowadays. This is the proposition that the question of how a particular judgment, on a particular occasion, is to be justified, is independent of the question of how that judgment comes to be formed by the individual who forms it. This thesis, which I shall call j-independence, is deplored in certain (self-styled (...) as ‘naturalized’) schools of epistemology. Its denial is one of the two dogmas of this essay’s title. The other dogma is the metaphysical one on which it rests, which I shall call personalism. (shrink)

I offer a critical review of several different conceptions of the activity of foundational research, from the time of Gauss to the present. These are (1) the traditional image, guiding Gauss, Dedekind, Frege and others, that sees in the search for more adequate basic systems a logical excavation of a priori structures, (2) the program to find sound formal systems for so-called classical mathematics that can be proved consistent, usually associated with the name of Hilbert, and (3) the historicist alternative, (...) guiding Riemann, Poincaré, Weyl and others, that seeks to perfect available conceptual systems with the aim to avoid conceptual limitations and expand the range of theoretical options. I shall contend that, at times, assumptions about the foundational enterprise emerge from certain dogmas that are frequently inherited from previous, outdated images. To round the discussion, I mention some traits of an alternative program that investigates the epistemology of mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

Research questions in mainstream epistemology often take for granted a cognitive internalist picture of the mind. Perhaps this is unsurprising given the seemingly safe presumptions that knowledge entails belief and that the kind of belief that knowledge entails supervenes exclusively on brainbound cognition. It will be argued here that the most plausible version of the entailment thesis holds just that knowledge entails dispositional belief. However, regardless of whether occurrent belief supervenes only as the cognitive internalist permits, we should reject the (...) idea that dispositional belief supervenes only in cognitive internalist-friendly ways. These observations, taken together, reveal two things: first, that a cognitive internalist picture of the mind is much more dispensable in epistemology than has been assumed and, second, that pursuing questions in extended epistemology need not involve any radical departure from the commitments of more traditional epistemological projects. (shrink)

Current epistemological orthodoxy has it that knowledge is incompatible with luck. More precisely: Knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck . This is often treated as a truism which is not even in need of argumentative support. In this paper, I argue that there is lucky knowledge. In the first part, I use an intuitive and not very developed notion of luck to show that there are cases of knowledge which are “lucky” in that sense. In the second part, I (...) look at philosophical conceptions of luck and come to the conclusion that knowledge can be lucky in those senses, too. I also turns out that a probabilistic notion of luck can help us see in what ways a particular piece of knowledge or belief can be lucky or not lucky. (shrink)

In a recent note Roger Carlson presented a rather negative appraisal of my treatment of the logic of Fisherian significance testing in [10]. The main issue between us involves Carlson's thesis that, within the limits set by Fisher, standard significance tests are valuable tools of data analysis as they stand, i.e., without modification of the structure of the reasoning they employ. Call this the adequacy thesis. In my paper I argued that the pattern of reasoning employed by tests of significance (...) needs to be justified in spite of its unquestioned acceptance by most researchers, The best justification offered to date—by R. A. Fisher—is seriously defective. Therefore the adequacy thesis is not justified. I proposed some alterations of the pattern of reasoning employed by tests of significance and argued that they guarantee that tests are adequate epistemological tools. (shrink)

The two dogmas at issue are the Humean dogma that “‘is’ statements do not imply ‘ought’ statements” and the Kantian dogma that “‘ought’ statements imply ‘can’” statements. The extant literature concludes these logically contradict each other. On the contrary, it is argued here that while there is no derivable formal contradiction, the juxtaposition of the dogmas manifests a philosophical disagreement over how to understand the logic of prescriptions. This disagreement bears on how to understand current metaethical debate between (...) realists and non-realists about morality in a way not heretofore investigated. The conclusion is that realists have the resources to account for both dogmas, while non-realists, if they strictly adhere to the “is”/“ought” gap, cannot give an adequate account of why “ought” implies “can”. (shrink)

The claims of the epistemological 'anarchists' have their roots in the orthodox tradition as well as in the Popperian. In particular they follow from the work of Quine. Meaning variance and incommensurability follow directly from the holistic conception of meaning in his 'network' view. Quine's efforts to evade this conclusion fail. His attempt to develop a theory-neutral notion of observation sentence is shown (1) to be inconsistent with his previous claims since it involves the tacit acceptance of the ' (...) class='Hi'>dogma of reductionism', (2) to involve the acceptance of a questionable 'third dogma', i.e. the stimulus-response theory of behaviorist psychology, and (3) ultimately to miss the point of the anarchists. In Quinian terms, in order for observation sentences to perform the function of intertheoretical 'arbiters', what is needed is 'similarity of assent', which is not a meaningful notion on an internetwork basis. (shrink)

The recently celebrated division into ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems of consciousness is unfortunate and misleading. Built on functionalist grounds, it carves up the subject matter by declaring that the most elusive parts need a fundamentally and intrinsically different solution. What we have, rather, are ‘difficult’ problems of conscious experience, but problems that are not difficult per se. Their difficulty is relative, among other things, to the kind of solution one is looking for and the tools used to accomplish the task. (...) I argue that the study of conscious experience in our scientific and philosophical tradition is a very difficult problem because it has been addressed with inappropriate tools: with harmful long-lasting and inadequate dogmas that have dogged science for centuries. I describe five of these dogmas, which are: the existence of an objective reality independent of human understanding; the subordination of epistemology to ontology; the restricted view of the objectivist-subjectivist dichotomy; the exclusion of the body from the study of the mind; and the idea of explaining the mind in terms of the neurophysiological processes of individual brains. I claim that conscious experience is not a transcendental, paranatural, mystic or magic phenomenon. It is tractable and approachable with scientific methods. However, one must look not only for non-reductionist views to approach it, but also for views that avoid the dogmas here described. Conscious experience is a living phenomenon and it has to be understood as such. Accordingly, our understanding of it has to make sense at several levels, from evolution to morphophysiology, from neuroanatomy to language. I put forward an approach to conscious experience which is free of the dogmas that make the study of conscious experience so difficult. This view, called ecological naturalism, is a non-functionalist and non-reductive view that provides an naturalistic account of the mind. It also puts special emphasis on irreducible supra-individual biological processes that are essential in the realization of mental phenomena and therefore conscious experience. (shrink)

This paper is a reexamination of Two Dogmas in the light of Quine's ongoing debate with Carnap over analyticity. It shows, first, that analytic is a technical term within Carnap's epistemology. As such it is intelligible, and Carnap's position can meet Quine's objections. Second, it shows that the core of Quine's objection is that he has an alternative epistemology to advance, one which appears to make no room for analyticity. Finally, the paper shows that Quine's alternative epistemology is itself open (...) to very serious objections. Quine is not thereby refuted, but neither can Carnap's analyticity be dismissed as dogma. (shrink)

This article aims to clarify the epistemological foundations of the Freudian energetics model, starting with a historical review of the 19th century scientific context in which Freud's research lay down its roots. Beyond the physiological and anatomical references of Project for a Scientific Psychology, the physiology Freud makes reference to is in reality primarily anchored in an epistemological model derived from physics. Whilst across the Rhine, the autonomy of physiology in relation to physics was far from being accomplished, (...) as a counterpoint, in France, the revolution in physiology driven by Claude Bernard established itself autonomously from physics,. In contrast, Freud's scientific landscape is entirely dominated by the physics elevated to the rank of an ideal science. The influence of Helmholtz, who is both a medical doctor and a physicist, has a determining influence on Freud's training. The discoveries in physics at that time, in particular the formulation of the principle of 'conservation of force' - first principle of thermodynamics - will constitute the points of reference upon which Freud will elaborate his energetics model, then subsequently, the idea of economy in his metapsychology. In this way we can trace both the historic and epistemological path that led Freud from a concept based on physics, and more specifically thermodynamic energy, to an idea of nervous energy that constitutes the basis of the concept of "quantity" as it is stated as 'first fundamental idea' in Project for a Scientific Psychology. This notion will subsequently evolve, and lead Freud to the introduction of the concept of 'psychical energy,' this time in a purely metapsychological sense. (shrink)

The author argues that Quine’s criticism of Kantian analytical/synthetic distinction, as well as transcendentalist reductionism, is not entirely adequate. Furthermore, the author states that Kant’s and Quine’s theories of experience and cognition (transcendentalist and holistic) are based on a common dogma, the one of consistency. Taking into account their uncritical ac-ceptance of experience as a system that is able to adjust new and old elements to each other, both philosophers have much more in common than Quine and his followers (...) might have ex- pected. (shrink)

Conceptualism, like any other philosophical doctrine of comparable scope, has both ontological and epistemological aspects. Ontologically, however, conceptualism does not differ significantly from certain forms of nominalism. 1 At its root lies an epistemological thesis: All objects of sensory intuition are localized in space and time. 2 In this paper, I wish to explore some of the consequences of this thesis.

Michael Williams has argued that radical “external world” skepticism, far from being an interesting philosophical discovery about knowledge, is actually a philosophical artifact, a by-product of “Epistemological Realism,” the view that there are objective epistemological relations able to group distinct kinds of “knowledge” (e.g., “experiential” vs. “external worldly”) into a context-invariant evidential order. I argue against this thesis. It is the skeptic’s conception of the world’s objectivity, not his conception of knowledge’s objectivity as a singular unified context-invariant structure, (...) I maintain, that ultimately underlies the skeptic’s result. And where Epistemological Realism does enter the picture, it enters mainly as a consequence of Metaphysical Realism itself. Maintaining that the metaphysical realism at issue here is a natural, indeed platitudinous, doctrine, I argue that skepticism is better viewed as a philosophical discovery about knowledge than as an artifact of contentious philosophical dogma. (shrink)

In analogy with Rousseau's concept of ?civil religion? as a system of ?positive dogmas?, ?without which?, as he observed, ?a man cannot be a good citizen?, this paper advances the concept of ?civil epistemology? as the positive dogmas without which the agents of government actions cannot be held accountable by democratic citizens. The civil epistemology of democracy shapes the citizen's views on the nature of political reality, on how the facts of political reality can be known and by whom. Modern (...) liberal democratic politics assumes that the exercise of political power can be manifest in a visible domain of publicly accessible facts. It rests on the Enlightenment faith in the powers of light and visibility to demystify political power, render political actors more exposed and therefore more honestly accountable and enlist the sense of sight as a vehicle of universal political participation. It is, in this context, that technology has come to play such an important symbolic role in the construction of the particular democratic genre of public action as a political spectacle. Democratic civil epistemology, and technology ? in the widest sense of the word ? as the prototype of action which can be observed in the field of visual perception, uphold the democratic conception of politics as a view. Together they define political actors as visible performers, journalists as observers (who translate actual seeing into virtual seeing) and the citizens as witnesses. (shrink)

In what does philosophical progress consist? 'Vertical' progress corresponds to development within a specific paradigm/framework for theorizing (of the sort associated, revolutions aside, with science); 'horizontal' progress corresponds to the identification and cultivation of diverse paradigms (of the sort associated, conservativism aside, with art and pure mathematics). Philosophical progress seems to involve both horizontal and vertical dimensions, in a way that is somewhat puzzling: philosophers work in a number of competing frameworks (like artists or mathematicians), while typically maintaining that only (...) one of these is correct (like scientists). I diagnose this situation as reflecting that we are presently quite far from the end of inquiry into philosophical methodology. The good news is that we appear to be making advances on this score. The bad news is that failure to recognize or make explicit that our standards are in flux often leads to dogmatism, as I illustrate by attention to three assumptions presently operative in metaphysical and metametaphysical contexts. I close by identifying a tension between vertical and horizontal progress in philosophy, and suggesting an updated version of Carnap's principle of tolerance for new philosophical forms. (shrink)

Davidson's anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the anomaly of (...) the mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices. (shrink)

SummaryThis article is a defense of a semantic concept of incommensurability. Davidson's criticism of the dualism of scheme and content and Ramberg's davidsonian pragmatic concept of incommensurability are discussed. It is argued that Davidson's argument against conceptual relativism fails to undermine the notion of two languages being mutually partially not translatable. It is then claimed that a non‐trivial concept of semantic incommensurability based on the notion of intranslatability does makes sense, does not presuppose the scheme‐content dualism and is consistent with (...) an objectivist view of progress in science. It is then concluded that, although the widely held view that the incommensurability thesis entails some form of epistemological relativism must be rejected, it does follow from Davidson's criticism of the “third dogma” of empiricism that a sharp distinction of the kuhnian kind between “normal” disagreement and conceptual change can not be drawn. (shrink)

This paper reviews how research on the demarcation problem has developed, starting from Popper’s criterion of falsifiability and ending with recent naturalistically oriented approaches. The main differences between traditional and contemporary approaches to the problem are explicated in terms of six postulates called the traditional assumptions. It is argued that all of the assumptions can be dismissed without giving up on the demarcation problem and that doing so might benefit further discussions on pseudoscience. Four present-day research movements on evaluating the (...) boundaries of science are introduced: (1) philosophy of pseudoscience, (2) social epistemology of dissent, (3) agnotology, and (4) evaluation of expertise. Researchers working within these areas have abandoned some or all traditional assumptions. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is to criticize epistemological externalism in a way different from most other criticisms. Most criticisms claim externalism fails because it does not adequately explicate ordinary notions of knowledge and justification. Such criticisms are often unhelpful to the externalist because he may not even intend his theory to be such an explication. The criticism presented here avoids this difficulty. The other aim, achieved en route to this criticism, is to explode a dogma (...) of contemporary epistemology — that the primary end of epistemic endeavors is truth — and to bring to light the many other important goals there are for such endeavors in addition to truth. Several of these goals pertain to the power of knowledge in social contexts. The criticism ultimately made of externalism is that externalist knowledge is defective because it fails to achieve these extra-verific goals of epistemic endeavors. (shrink)

Quine’s arguments in the final two sections of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” bring semantic and epistemic concerns into spectacular collision. Many have thought that the arguments succeed in irreparably smashing a conception of a distinctively analytic and a priori philosophy to pieces. In Constructing the World, David Chalmers argues that much of this distinctively analytical and a priori conception of philosophy can be reconstructed, with Quine’s criticisms leaving little lasting damage. I agree with Chalmers that Quine’s arguments do not have (...) the lasting damage some take them to have. However, I do not think that Chalmers has succeeded in explaining why. The core of Chalmers’s error lies in the rational dispositionalism that forms the metasemantics of his Carnapian intensionalism. Responding to Quine requires recognizing conceptions of both concepts and epistemic normativity that go beyond the opposition between irrationality and conceptual change that Chalmers brings to bear on Quine. I explain this expanded conception of concepts and epistemic normativity in terms of another fundamental aim of Constructing the World, namely that of providing an account of Fregean sense, or more generally of defending what Chalmers calls epistemological semantics. (shrink)

I consider the ‘inferentialist’ thesis that whenever a mental state rationally justifies a belief it is in virtue of inferential relations holding between the contents of the two states. I suggest that no good argument has yet been given for the thesis. I focus in particular on Williamson (2000) and Ginsborg (2011) and show that neither provides us with a reason to deny the plausible idea that experience can provide non-inferential justification for belief. I finish by pointing out some theoretical (...) costs and tensions associated with endorsing inferentialism. (shrink)

One proposal is to generalize UAl to define an epistemological notion of analyticity: a sentence s is analytic just in case, necessarily, whoever understands s assents to s. This chapter considers what is epistemically available simply on the basis of linguistic and conceptual competence. It deals with a provisional sketch of some obstacles to extracting epistemological consequences from understanding‐assent links and of some attempts to overcome them. A trickier question is whether such possibilities of an illusion of understanding (...) have negative epistemological repercussions for cases of genuine understanding, since a skeptical doubt can arise for the subject in the latter cases too as to whether the understanding is not an illusion. Quine’s epistemological holism in “Two Dogmas” undermines his notorious later claim about the deviant logician’s predicament: “when he tries to deny the doctrine he only changes the subject”. (shrink)

It is well understood that Wittgenstein defends religious faith against positivistic criticisms on the grounds of its logical independence. But exactly how are we to understand the nature of that independence? Most scholars take Wittgenstein to equate language-games with belief-systems, and thus to assert that religions are logical schemes founded on their own basic beliefs and principles of inference. By contrast, I argue that on Wittgenstein’s view, to have religious faith is to hold fast to a certain picture of the (...) world according to which one orients one’s actions and attitudes, possibly even in dogmatic defiance of contrary evidence. Commitment to such a picture is grounded in passion, not intellection, and systematic coherence is largely irrelevant. (shrink)

W. V. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, first published in 1951, is one of the most influential articles in the history of analytic philosophy. It does not just question central semantic and epistemological views of logical positivism and early analytic philosophy, it also marks a momentous challenge to the ideas that conceptual analysis is a main task of philosophy and that philosophy is an a priori discipline which differs in principle from the empirical sciences. These ideas dominated early analytic (...) philosophy, but similar views are to be found in the Kantian tradition, in phenomenology and in philosophical hermeneutics. In questioning this consensus from the perspective of a radical empiricism, Quine’s article has had a sustained and lasting impact across all these philosophical divisions. Quine himself moved from the abandonment of the analytic/synthetic distinction to a thoroughgoing naturalism, and many analytic philosophers have followed his lead. The current collection differs from other anthologies devoted to Quine in two respects. On the one hand, it focuses on his attack on analyticity, apriority and necessity; on the other, it considers implications of that attack that far transcend the limits of Quine scholarship, and lie at the heart of the current self-understanding of philosophy. The contributors include both opponents and proponents of the dichotomies attacked by Quine. Furthermore, they include both eminent figures such as Boghossian, Burge, and Davidson, and up and coming younger philosophers. (shrink)

In this paper we purport to qualify the claim, advanced by Appelbaum (1999) that speech perception research, in the last 70 years or so, has endorsed a view on the nature of speech for which no evidence can be adduced and which has resisted falsification through active ad hoc “theoretical repair” carried by speech scientists. We show that the author’s qualms on the putative dogmatic status of speech research are utterly unwarranted, if not misconstrued as a whole. On more general (...) grounds, the present article can be understood as a work on the rather underdeveloped area of the philosophy and history of Linguistics. (shrink)

The Mahayana tradition in Buddhist philosophy is defined by its ethical orientation--the adoption of bodhicitta, the aspiration to attain awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings. And indeed, this tradition is known for its literature on ethics, which reflect the Madhyamaka tradition of philosophy, and emphasizes both the imperative to cultivate an attitude of universal care (karuna) grounded in the realization of emptiness, impermanence, independence, and the absence of any self in persons or other phenomena.This position is morally very (...) attractive, but raises an important problem: if all phenomena, including persons and actions, are only conventionally real, can moral injunctions or principles be binding, or does the conventional status of the reality we inhabit condemn us to an ethical relativism or nihilism? In Moonpaths, the Cowherds address an analogous problem in the domain of epistemology and argues that the Madhyamaka tradition has the resources to develop a robust account of truth and knowledge within the context of conventional reality. The essays explore a variety of ways in which to understand important Buddhist texts on ethics and Mahayana moral theory so as to make sense of the genuine force of morality. (shrink)

Current epistemological dogma has it that the twin goalsof believing truths and avoiding errors exhaust our cognitive aspirations.On such a view, (call it the TG view) the only evaluationsthat count as genuinely epistemological are those that evaluatesomething (a belief, believer, set of beliefs, a cognitivetrait or process, etc.) in terms of its connection to thesetwo goods. In particular, this view implies that all theepistemic value of knowledge must be derived from thevalue of the two goals cited in (...) TG. I argue thatthis implication is false, and thus that the TG view must be abandoned. I propose a candidate to replacethe TG view that makes better sense of the value ofknowledge. (shrink)

In Moonshadows, the Cowherds, a team of ten scholars of Buddhist Studies, address the nature of conventional truth as it is understood in the Madhyamaka tradition deriving from Nagarjuna and Candrakarti. Moonshadows combines textual scholarship with philosophical analysis to elucidate the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical consequences of this doctrine.

In this paper we purport to qualify the claim, advanced by Appelbaum (1999) that speech perception research, in the last 70 years or so, has endorsed a view on the nature of speech for which no evidence can be adduced and which has resisted falsification through active ad hoc “theoretical repair” carried by speech scientists. We show that the author’s qualms on the putative dogmatic status of speech research are utterly unwarranted, if not misconstrued as a whole. On more general (...) grounds, the present article can be understood as a work on the rather underdeveloped area of the philosophy and history of Linguistics. (shrink)

. In this paper we purport to qualify the claim, advanced by Appelbaum that speech perception research, in the last 70 years or so, has endorsed a view on the nature of speech for which no evidence can be adduced and which has resisted falsification through active ad hoc “theoretical repair” carried by speech scientists. We show that the author’s qualms on the putative dogmatic status of speech research are utterly unwarranted, if not misconstrued as a whole. On more general (...) grounds, the present article can be understood as a work on the rather underdeveloped area of the philosophy and history of Linguistics. (shrink)

W. V. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, first published in 1951, is one of the most influential articles in the history of analytic philosophy. It does not just question central semantic and epistemological views of logical positivism and early analytic philosophy, it also marks a momentous challenge to the ideas that conceptual analysis is a main task of philosophy and that philosophy is an a priori discipline which differs in principle from the empirical sciences. These ideas dominated early analytic (...) philosophy, but similar views are to be found in the Kantian tradition, in phenomenology and in philosophical hermeneutics. In questioning this consensus from the perspective of a radical empiricism, Quine’s article has had a sustained and lasting impact across all these philosophical divisions. Quine himself moved from the abandonment of the analytic/synthetic distinction to a thoroughgoing naturalism, and many analytic philosophers have followed his lead. The current collection differs from other anthologies devoted to Quine in two respects. On the one hand, it focuses on his attack on analyticity, apriority and necessity; on the other, it considers implications of that attack that far transcend the limits of Quine scholarship, and lie at the heart of the current self-understanding of philosophy. The contributors include both opponents and proponents of the dichotomies attacked by Quine. Furthermore, they include both eminent figures such as Boghossian, Burge, and Davidson, and up and coming younger philosophers. (shrink)

Theology and religious beliefs, including issues dealing with theism, deism, creedal statements, dogma, and spiritualism are considered to be constructed reality. They are herein identified as first order truth. First order truth is personal truth and, as such, it becomes part of the reality of the believer. Constructed theological and religious belief is considered to be a legitimate part of radical constructivism irrespective of the validity and viability of the constructed reality. Second order truth, truth that is beyond the (...) limits of human verification, is herein introduced as the term for ultimate ontological and metaphysical reality. As such, reality is neither denied nor is it attributed to a solipsistic mind. Ultimate and so-called metaphysical reality is unknowable in the epistemological sense of having the capability of being known in any empirical and verifiable manner. To the degree that ultimate and metaphysical reality is known, it is known only via the constructs of the human mind. Perceptions of reality that arise from rigorous empirical research, including experimental and observational data, are certainly to be considered valid, reliable, and viable, but never irreplaceable. In the practice of science and the scientific method there is always the possibility of new hypotheses and theories based on new experimentation and new data, and thus, a case may be made that all knowledge, even scientific and empirical knowledge, is tentative. (shrink)

In the epistemology of his middle period, Plato repeatedly describes the alleged ‘intellection of true reality’ in terms of sight, vision, illumination, or touch. Does this show more than Plato’s preference for optic and haptic metaphors? Should we assume that this goes back to a specific reason to be found in his underlying epistemological position? On the traditional reading, Plato actually wants to defend a sort of intuitionism. According to this still wide-spread reading, he claims that there is a (...) very particular way of grasping Forms: Philosophers manage to come into a sort of direct contact with intelligible objects. Intellection is thus conceived as a quasi-visual presence of intelligible Forms. In our contribution, we want to challenge this interpretation by raising several objections against it. Surprisingly, there exists a close parallel in Aristotelian scholarship: Although Aristotle’s epistemology is built on considerably different foundations, there is an interpretative tradition according to which one has to assume a strict discontinuity between the methodical procedure and the intellection of the highest epistemic objects. As for Plato, we want to refuse an interpretation of Aristotle based on a concept of intuition characterized by the following features: Intuition is a specific way of gaining knowledge. It is independent of empirical conditions and leads to apriori knowledge. It consists of some experience of evidence or is accompanied by it. Knowledge gained by this kind of intuition does not need any further argument or justification. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper defends the philosophical importance of analyticity against the influential objections raised by W. V. Quine. It characterizes analyticity in a way that is nonepistemic, avoids Quine's objections and fits his general strictures, and explains the epistemological importance of analyticity. It also explains why even proponents of Quine's naturalized epistemology should value the epistemological importance of analyticity, in connection with questions about the correctness of their epistemic principles. Given these considerations, this paper may be regarded as having (...) rescued analyticity from the throes of suspicion and myth, as set by “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”. (shrink)

The basing demand on doxastic justification is a widely held and highly intuitive dogma of contemporary epistemology. In Silva [2015, AJP], I argued that the dialectical significance of this dogma is severely limited by our lack of independent grounds for endorsing it. Oliveira [2015, AJP] sought to defend the basing demand on doxastic justification. Here I explain why Oliveira’s attempted defense of the basing demand misses its mark. I also briefly suggest that there is an alternative way of (...) defending the basing demand. The alternative way is reconciliatory: it shows that most epistemologists may have been right to insist on such a demand, but perhaps still wrong to treat it as a dialectically powerful tool in the assessment of certain substantive epistemological theories. (shrink)

There is a dire need today to create spaces in which people can make meaning of their existence in the world, abiding by cultural frameworks and practices that acknowledge and validate a meaningful existence for all. People are not just isolated individuals but are connected in diverse ways with other persons within our natural and social environment which is part of the whole universe. The African philosophy of uBuntu or humaneness is re-emerging for its timely relevance and potential as indispensable (...) in our quest for global citizenship, peace, and mutual understanding in securing sustainable human development in the broader ecosystem. Comparative educationists have the challenge to devise theoretical frameworks, epistemological and pedagogical constructs as well as pragmatic, useful and effective ways of promoting the virtues of compassion and recognition of our common humanity in eliminating the ills of domination and control that are guided by greed, hatred, jealousy, and intolerance. Comparative Education for Global Citizenship, Peace and Shared Living through Ubuntu paves the way for a better understanding of the critical importance of the collective search and endeavor towards achieving the virtues of nonviolence, peace, shared values of living together, global citizenship, improved quality of life for all and a better appreciation of the positive implications of interdependence. (shrink)

Willard V. Quine’s 1951 article, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (Two Dogmas) was taken to be revolutionary because it rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction and the thesis that empirical statements are confirmed individually rather than holistically. The present chapter, however, argues that the overcoming of modern philosophy already included the overcoming of these theses by Hegelians, pragmatists and two critics of Hegelianism and pragmatism, Grace and Theodore de Laguna. From this perspective, Two Dogmas offers a Hegelian epistemology that was already superseded in (...) 1910. The perspective is largely based on the de Lagunas’ 1910 book Dogmatism and Evolution: Studies in Modern Philosophy. The de Lagunas’ book also helps to make clear that the real revolution Two Dogmas participated in was the marginalisation of their work and that of other speculative philosophers. Grace de Laguna surely recognised much of this when she stood opposite Quine as he first presented Two Dogmas. (shrink)