If ever there were scientific procedures that seemed immune to history, induction and deduction would be them. Their validity seemingly unimpinged by the vicissitudes of history, they appear a proper subject of discussion for philosophers and scientists, but not for historians. Historians pride themselves on demonstrating that the internal logic of theory is historical — a response to particular conditions. Breakdowns in logic present historians with opportune moments for historicization, for showing how theoreticians’ efforts to respond to their situation (...) made them move inconsistently. When it comes to induction and deduction, however, they seem so universal and basic — the logic and methodology of science unthinkable without them — that any effort to demonstrate their historically bound character risks relativizing science and, some would argue, undermine rational exchange. Can the historian participate, qua historian, in the conversation on induction and deduction without unraveling science and undermining rational exchange? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 64.2 (2003) 149-157 [Access article in PDF] Introduction:The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe Jacob Soll A leading figure at Cambridge University after World War II, Herbert Butterfield seems an unlikely forerunner of the kind of cultural history that is practiced today. Yet Butterfield was a pioneer. He saw the origins of modern historical consciousness in the scholarly practices of the (...) Renaissance. These practices, he maintained, were a significant part of the slow shift to rationalist thinking that occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. In his remarkable work, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (1940), Butterfield sought to show that Machiavelli's inductive use of historical examples was part of a larger empirical movement that slowly replaced religious and classical authority with the new authority of observation and deduction. Like Ernst Cassirer, he saw Machiavelli as an historical counterpart to Bacon, Descartes, Vesalius, and even Copernicus: The significance of the "experimental method" itself was not fully realized or clearly established until after the emergence in the seventeenth century of new scientific apparatus—the telescope, the microscope, and more accurate measuring-instruments for example; and even Bacon and Descartes, whose names have closely been associated with the scientific revolution, can hardly be said to have realized the implications of the new method. There is a transition then, but it is slower than many people have imagined and someone has rightly said that the middle ages do not come to an end until the seventeenth century. Machiavelli, as we shall see, has a place in the transition, for in the political and human sciences as well as the natural sciences a change did occur. Machiavelli is interesting not because he is a modern man [End Page 149] born out of due time, but because he illustrates one of the mediations by which the transition was accomplished. 1Butterfield turned to Emile Durkheim's sociological study of Renaissance education to understand the relationship between traditions of learning and the cosmological shift of the seventeenth century. 2 Durkheim had used Rabelais's portrait of Pantagruel's education to illustrate how the study of ancient language and the rise of historical erudition were not only instruments of aesthetic culture, but also constituted "a mine of positivist knowledge." Citing Erasmus, Durkheim himself maintained that linguistic philology was a preparation for higher disciplines—graviores disciplinæ. 3 The English historian agreed with the French sociologist: traditions of humanist learning were essential elements of a larger ethos of natural and practical studies that differentiated post-humanist Europe from the Middle Ages.Although his later work concentrated on questions of historiography, Butterfield never studied the full effect of historical practices on the learned culture of early modern Europe. 4 These papers seek to pick up where Butterfield left off, to understand the effect that humanist historical consciousness had on educated Europe at large. They will show that questions of historical accuracy and verification were the common link among diverse disciplines between 1400 and 1800. Rather than looking for theories of history and historical method solely in the works of historians, they will examine how non-historians discussed history in terms of their own fields of study. They will show how thinkers in the domains of architecture, art, astrology, education, law, medicine, natural philosophy, politics, and theology saw the importance of historical understanding and how they used it to shape their own particular forms of knowledge. By sketching an overview of the different applications of historical knowledge, we will begin to have a clearer view of the process by which humanism historicized the world of knowledge.Learned culture at the beginning of the seventeenth century is commonly associated with the rise of scientific authority. Church dogma and the Aristotelian logical tradition no longer sufficed to explain natural phenomena and to [End Page 150] quell the curiosity of the learned. 5 As Galileo so recklessly exclaimed, look into the telescope and witness with your own eyes that Aristotle was wrong about the moon. 6 For Galileo's colleague, the great Paduan Aristotelian... (shrink)

Epistemology, as generally understood by philosophers of science, is rather remote from the history of science and from historical concerns in general. Rheinberger shows that, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, a parallel, alternative discourse sought to come to terms with the rather fundamental experience of the thoroughgoing scientific changes brought on by the revolution in physics. Philosophers of science and historians of science alike contributed their share to what this essay describes as an ongoing quest to (...) historicize epistemology. Historical epistemology, in this sense, is not so concerned with the knowing subject and its mental capacities. Rather, it envisages science as an ongoing cultural endeavor and tries to assess the conditions under which the sciences in all their diversity take shape and change over time. (shrink)

The modern slavery literature engages with history in an extremely limited fashion. Our paper demonstrates to the utility of historical research to modern slavery researchers by explaining the rise and fall of the ethics-driven market category of “free-grown sugar” in nineteenth-century Britain. In the first decades of the century, the market category of “free-grown sugar” enabled consumers who were opposed to slavery to pay a premium for a more ethical product. After circa 1840, this market category disappeared, even though considerable (...) quantities of slave-grown sugar continued to arrive into the UK. We explain the disappearance of the market category. Our paper contributes to the on-going debates about slavery in management by historicizing and thus problematizing the concept of “slavery”. The paper challenges those modern slavery scholars who argue that lack of consumer knowledge about product provenance is the main barrier to the elimination of slavery from today’s international supply chains. The historical research presented in this paper suggests that consumer indifference, rather than simply ignorance, may be the more fundamental problem. The paper challenges the optimistic historical metanarrative that pervades much of the research on ethical consumption. It highlights the fragility of ethics-driven market categories, offering lessons for researchers and practitioners seeking to tackle modern slavery. (shrink)

Deductive Cogency holds that the set of propositions towards which one has, or is prepared to have, a given type of propositional attitude should be consistent and closed under logical consequence. While there are many propositional attitudes that are not subject to this requirement, e.g. hoping and imagining, it is at least prima facie plausible that Deductive Cogency applies to the doxastic attitude involved in propositional knowledge, viz. belief. However, this thought is undermined by the well-known preface paradox, leading a (...) number of philosophers to conclude that Deductive Cogency has at best a very limited role to play in our epistemic lives. I argue here that Deductive Cogency is still an important epistemic requirement, albeit not as a requirement on belief. Instead, building on a distinction between belief and acceptance introduced by Jonathan Cohen and recent developments in the epistemology of understanding, I propose that Deductive Cogency applies to the attitude of treating propositions as given in the context of attempting to understand a given phenomenon. I then argue that this simultaneously accounts for the plausibility of the considerations in favor of Deductive Cogency and avoids the problematic consequences of the preface paradox. (shrink)

The Chinese tianrenheyi thesis bespeaks a correlative cosmology irreducible to the Western metaphysics. This article historicizes tianrenheyi for new implications to help rethink the given concepts of ‘person/thing,’ ‘environment/nature,’ and ‘relationality’ in contemporary ethical and environmental education in three steps. First, it turns to Yu Ying-Shih’s writing for a historical and ethical picture of tianrenheyi as an ‘Axial breakthrough’ in Confucius' time and with direct relevance to Confucian person-making education. Second, it moves on to Roger Ames’ unpacking of tianrenheyi as (...) hospitalized in a ‘correlative cosmology’ and ‘Confucian relational personhood’ to help us re-understand Confucian ‘person’ as being relational. Finally, it shows how these re-invoked philosophical–ethical–cosmological theses expose a ‘foundational individualism’ which grounds and confines current educational thinking to an anthropocentric ordering. As an alternative, this article calls for a productive symbiotic conjoining between humans and their cultural–natural environs toward nurturing today’s youth into ecologically literate, responsible, and responsive co-beings. (shrink)

In this article, the relationship between philosophy and history of education is delved into. First, it is noted that both disciplines have diverged from each other over the last few decades to become relatively autonomous subsectors within the pedagogical sciences, each with its own discourses, its own expositional characteristics, its own channels of communication, and its own networks. From the perspective of the history of education, it seems as though more affiliation has been sought with the science of history. The (...) history of education, in any event, has in the past few years become more historicizing and less ‘educationalizing’. According to the author, there are signs that indicate that such an analogous line of reasoning, mutatis mutandis, also applies for the philosophy of education. Does this mean that there are no longer any bridges from the one area to the other or that none are possible? Probably not. In the second portion, it is shown that the modern or even postmodern ‘new cultural history of education’, with its often ironical and demythologizing traits uses or can use a considerable amount of ‘grand theory’. Indeed, the development of an adequate conceptual apparatus that also has to cope with the problem of ‘presentism’ assumes a constant dialogue with the past and for this a philosophical‐interpretative approach is still the best situated. Inversely, the Foucauldian perspective shows that philosophy in general and philosophy of education in particular equally hardly do without history. Within the reflection on pedagogical praxis, the historical and the philosophical thus probably will continue to rely on each other—if only as allies against the dominance of short‐winded empirical‐quantitative research. Still, it would be naive to think that, from this possible alliance, the fragmentation of historically developed knowledge systems with their own sociological and institutional foundation of scientific activities can be rectified in a trice. (shrink)

A flurry of discussions about plagiarism and predatory publications in recent times has brought the issue of scientific misconduct in India to the fore. The debate has framed scientific misconduct in India as a recent phenomenon. This article questions that framing, which rests on the current tendency to define and police scientific misconduct as a matter of individual behavior. Without ignoring the role of individuals, this article contextualizes their actions by calling attention to the conduct of the institutions, as well (...) as social and political structures that are historically responsible for governing the practice of science in India since the colonial period. Scientific conduct, in other words, is here examined as a historical phenomenon borne of the interaction between individuals’ aspirations and the systems that impose, measure, and reward scientific output in particular ways. Importantly, historicizing scientific misconduct in this way also underscores scientist-driven initiatives and regulatory interventions that have placed India at the leading edge of reform. With the formal establishment of the Society for Scientific Values in 1986, Indian scientists became the first national community worldwide to monitor research integrity in an institutionally organized way. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 327 - 346 This paper explores the place of historicism in Anglophone and especially analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy arose as part of a general modernist revolt against the developmental historicisms of the nineteenth century with their faith in progress. Modernism inspired more formal approaches to knowledge, philosophy, and the human sciences. It is, however, a mistake to assume the rise of modernism and analytic philosophy left no space for historicism. Three main traditions of (...) historicism continued to persist in Anglophone philosophy through the twentieth century. First, the lingering presence of idealism continued to inspire the historicism of philosophers such as R. G. Collingwood and later Charles Taylor. Second, modernist historians, such as Quentin Skinner, sometimes grabbed at arguments from analytic philosophy to defend their methodological agendas. Third, the rise of holistic themes in analytic philosophy opened the way to historicist moments and themes in philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. (shrink)

At the end of the 19th century, the vocabulary of sexuality - perversion - became one of the primary means by which people began to articulate and think about their individuality, their sense of self. Joining authors like Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson, I suggest the importance of a ‘style of reasoning’ to the creation of sexual kinds at the end of the 19th century, a kind of reasoning that might be styled as historical. For the invert to become possible (...) as a human kind, the conceptual space for an understanding of inverts as specific kinds needed to be cleared. In France, this was accomplished by conceiving individuals as elaborated historically, as the product of prior generations, and by differentiating them from other kinds of people via notions of heredity and degeneration. The invert was plotted within the meta-récit of French progress (and national degeneration). This logic of ‘historicization’ also entailed the scrutiny of the patient’s past in order to reveal his or her ‘nature’ as pathological. Understanding the conceptualization of inversion as including, in part, a ‘pursuit of memory’ provides a window onto the vexing question of how people come to take up their classifications; that is, how discourses interact with the subjects they purport to describe. Through the ‘pursuit of memory’, persons were encouraged to (re)describe their pasts in terms of the present diagnosis. An essential attribute of the literature on ‘inversion’ was precisely such an historically formed understanding of pathological individuals; an understanding that ushered in the transformation from acts to natures, from individuals to kinds, from sodomites to homosexuals. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century scientist Hermann von Helmholtz’s peculiar wavering between empiricism and transcendentalism in his philosophy of science in general, and in his theory of perception in particular, is a much debated and well-documented topic in the history and philosophy of science. This contribution aims at providing a fresh angle on this classical issue, by considering Helmholtz’s account of differential consciousness against the background of a centuries-old philosophical debate between the empiricist tradition and the tradition of transcendental idealism. By placing Helmholtz’s psychology (...) against the background of a historical narrative stretching from Hume to Fichte, one can gain insight into the possible merits of his empirico-transcendentalism with regard to the problem of differentiation. More particularly, it is argued that Helmholtz’s psychology tilted towards transcendentalism when met with the classical theoretical problems of strict empiricism in dealing with the foundation of consciousness, most notably circularity and infinite regress. Without claiming that Helmholtz’s theorizing presented a self-conscious attempt to overcome the latter issues, his well-known wavering between perspectives in general, and his appropriation of the a priori in particular, might have served him well in avoiding the deadlocks of empiricism. As noted at the end, however, Helmholtz’s account produced complex philosophical problems of its own. (shrink)

The Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 11, Historicizing Theories, Identities, and Nations, examines the work and influence of scholars, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, A. Irving Hallowell, and Edward Westermarck, and anthropological (...) practices and theories in Vietnam and Ukraine as well as the United States. Contributions also focus on the influence of Western thought and practice on anthropological traditions, as well as issues of relativism, physical anthropology, language, epistemology, ethnography, and social synergy. (shrink)

The distinction between the syntactic and the semantic approach to scientific theories emerged in formal philosophy of science. The semantic approach is commonly considered more advanced and more successful than the syntactic one, but the transition from the one approach to the other was not brought about without any loss. In essence, it is the formal analysis of atomic propositions and the analysis of deductive reasoning that dropped out of consideration in at least some of the elaborated versions of the (...) semantic approach. In structuralist theory of science, as founded by Sneed and Stegmüller, the focus is on global propositions concerning the question of whether or not certain empirical systems satisfy a set-theoretic predicate that encodes the axioms of a scientific theory. Hence, an analysis of deductive reasoning from atomic premisses with the help of a given theory is missing. The objective of the present paper is to develop a deductive system on the basis of the structuralist framework. This system comes with a novel formulation of empirical propositions in structuralism. (shrink)

In this study on deduction, the authors argue that people reason by imagining the relevant state of affairs, ie building an internal model of it, formulating a tentative conclusion based on this model and then searching for alternative models.

This book stands at the intersection of two topics: the decidability and computational complexity of hybrid logics, and the deductive systems designed for them. Hybrid logics are here divided into two groups: standard hybrid logics involving nominals as expressions of a separate sort, and non-standard hybrid logics, which do not involve nominals but whose expressive power matches the expressive power of binder-free standard hybrid logics.The original results of this book are split into two parts. This division reflects the division of (...) the book itself. The first type of results concern model-theoretic and complexity properties of hybrid logics. Since hybrid logics which we call standard are quite well investigated, the efforts focused on hybrid logics referred to as non-standard in this book. Non-standard hybrid logics are understood as modal logics with global counting operators ) whose expressive power matches the expressive power of binder-free standard hybrid logics. The relevant results comprise: 1. Establishing a sound and complete axiomatization for the modal logic K with global counting operators ), which can be easily extended onto other frame classes, 2. Establishing tight complexity bounds, namely NExpTime-completeness for the modal logic with global counting operators defined over the classes of arbitrary, reflexive, symmetric, serial and transitive frames ), MT), MD), MB), MK4) with numerical subscripts coded in binary. Establishing the exponential-size model property for this logic defined over the classes of Euclidean and equivalential frames ), MS5).Results of the second type consist of designing concrete deductive systems for standard and non-standard hybrid logics. More precisely, they include: 1. Devising a prefixed and an internalized tableau calculi which are sound, complete and terminating for a rich class of binder-free standard hybrid logics. An interesting feature of indicated calculi is the nonbranching character of the rule, 2. Devising a prefixed and an internalized tableau calculi which are sound, complete and terminating for non-standard hybrid logics. The internalization technique applied to a tableau calculus for the modal logic with global counting operators is novel in the literature, 3. Devising the first hybrid algorithm involving an inequality solver for modal logics with global counting operators. Transferring the arithmetical part of reasoning to an inequality solver turned out to be sufficient in ensuring termination.The book is directed to philosophers and logicians working with modal and hybrid logics, as well as to computer scientists interested in deductive systems and decision procedures for logics. Extensive fragments of the first part of the book can also serve as an introduction to hybrid logics for wider audience interested in logic.The content of the book is situated in the areas of formal logic and theoretical computer science with some elements of the theory of computational complexity. (shrink)

Knafo and Teschke’s provocative essay ‘Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism’ has prompted considerable debate. From a position of critical support, the present article intervenes in this debate by making three interrelated points. First, the structuralist–historicist divide that Knafo and Teschke identify is misleading and should be reformulated. Though the duality is real, this divide is best understood as a continuum between two kinds of historicism: a structural and an institutional historicism. Second, the article contextualises Knafo and (...) Teschke’s intervention against the backdrop of their own intellectual development. Rather than returning to the tradition’s historicist origins, they have in fact stretched Political Marxism’s institutional tendencies to new limits. Third, the article concludes with a revision of their critique of the concept of market dependence. It is argued that the concept can be salvaged for the purposes of institutional historicism provided that it is rearticulated. (shrink)

Liao and Carbonell point out that much of the danger embedded in “materialized oppression” derives from the fact that the essence of that marginalized oppression may not be overt. It can often rece...

It is no longer necessary to defend current historiography of psychology against the strictures aimed at its early text book incarnations in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, Robert Young and others denigrated then standard textbook histories of psychology for their amateurism and their justifications propaganda for specific standpoints in current psychology, disguised as history. Since then, at least some textbooks writers and working historians of psychology have made such criticisms their own. The demand for textbook histories continues nonetheless. (...) Psychology, at least in the United States, remains the only discipline that makes historical representations of itself in the form of “history and systems” courses an official part of its pedagogical canon, required, interestingly enough, for the license in clinical practice.1In the meantime, the professionalization of scholarship in history of psychology has proceeded apace. All of the trends visible in historical and social studies of other sciences, as well as in general cultural and intellectual history, are noe present in the historical study of psychology. Yet despite the visibility and social importance of psychology's various applications, and the prominence of certain schools of psychological thought such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural and political debate, the historiography of psychology has continued to hold a marginal position in history and social studies of science. (shrink)

It has been the dominant view that probabilistic explanations of particular facts must be inductive in character. I argue here that this view is mistaken, and that the aim of probabilistic explanation is not to demonstrate that the explanandum fact was nomically expectable, but to give an account of the chance mechanism(s) responsible for it. To this end, a deductive-nomological model of probabilistic explanation is developed and defended. Such a model has application only when the probabilities occurring in covering laws (...) can be interpreted as measures of objective chance, expressing the strength of physical propensities. Unlike inductive models of probabilistic explanation, this deductive model stands in no need of troublesome requirements of maximal specificity or epistemic relativization. (shrink)

Methods available for the axiomatization of arbitrary finite-valued logics can be applied to obtain sound and complete intelim rules for all truth-functional connectives of classical logic including the Sheffer stroke and Peirce’s arrow. The restriction to a single conclusion in standard systems of natural deduction requires the introduction of additional rules to make the resulting systems complete; these rules are nevertheless still simple and correspond straightforwardly to the classical absurdity rule. Omitting these rules results in systems for intuitionistic versions (...) of the connectives in question. (shrink)

This volume examines the notion of an analytic proof as a natural deduction, suggesting that the proof's value may be understood as its normal form--a concept with significant implications to proof-theoretic semantics.

The relation between logic and thought has long been controversial, but has recently influenced theorizing about the nature of mental processes in cognitive science. One prominent tradition argues that to explain the systematicity of thought we must posit syntactically structured representations inside the cognitive system which can be operated upon by structure sensitive rules similar to those employed in systems of natural deduction. I have argued elsewhere that the systematicity of human thought might better be explained as resulting from (...) the fact that we have learned natural languages which are themselves syntactically structured. According to this view, symbols of natural language are external to the cognitive processing system and what the cognitive system must learn to do is produce and comprehend such symbols. In this paper I pursue that idea by arguing that ability in natural deduction itself may rely on pattern recognition abilities that enable us to operate on external symbols rather than encodings of rules that might be applied to internal representations. To support this suggestion, I present a series of experiments with connectionist networks that have been trained to construct simple natural deductions in sentential logic. These networks not only succeed in reconstructing the derivations on which they have been trained, but in constructing new derivations that are only similar to the ones on which they have been trained. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider a family of three-valued regular logics: the well-known strong and weak S.C. Kleene’s logics and two intermedi- ate logics, where one was discovered by M. Fitting and the other one by E. Komendantskaya. All these systems were originally presented in the semantical way and based on the theory of recursion. However, the proof theory of them still is not fully developed. Thus, natural deduction sys- tems are built only for strong Kleene’s logic both with (...) one (A. Urquhart, G. Priest, A. Tamminga) and two designated values (G. Priest, B. Kooi, A. Tamminga). The purpose of this paper is to provide natural deduction systems for weak and intermediate regular logics both with one and two designated values. (shrink)

The generic notion of “religion” and its conceptual demarcation from “the secular” have been critically examined by a number of scholars from the “critical religion” perspective. The interrogation of the term “religion,” and other related terms, questions modern formations of knowledge and power in general. This paper constitutes part of the project which examines norms and imperatives which govern sociological discourse on religion. Max Weber and Emile Durkheim are particularly significant figures in sociology of religion. The aim of this paper (...) is to historicize the category “religion” employed by Weber and Durkheim, in the specific social context of Germany and France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It hopes to contribute to a greater understanding of the ideological foundation of sociological theories of religion. (shrink)

Natural Deduction Natural Deduction is a common name for the class of proof systems composed of simple and self-evident inference rules based upon methods of proof and traditional ways of reasoning that have been applied since antiquity in deductive practice. The first formal ND systems were independently constructed in the 1930s by G. Gentzen and S. Jaśkowski and … Continue reading Natural Deduction →.

This paper traces the evolution of a coherent feminist genre in written historical texts during and after slavery, and in relation to contemporary feminist writing in the West Indies. The paper problematizes the category ‘woman’ during slavery, arguing that femininity was itself deeply differentiated by class and race, thus leading to historical disunity in the notion of feminine identity during slavery. This gender neutrality has not been sufficiently appreciated in contemporary feminist thought leading to liberal feminist politics in the region. (...) This has proved counter productive in the attempts of Caribbean feminist theorizing to provide alternative understandings of the construction of the nation-state as it emerged out of slavery and the role of women themselves in the shaping of modern Caribbean society. (shrink)

In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel. A Trip to Cuba appeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Dana's story of his ???vacation voyage,??? To Cuba and Back . These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military ???filibusters.??? Howe's narrative (...) demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. ???I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,??? she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 ???sprightly??? pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of ???foreign??? institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores. (shrink)

This chapter is organized around two central questions. First, if art is political, in what ways is it political? Most theorists who identify themselves in some way with feminist aesthetics agree that art is political, but differ in how they think it is political. The second question is, if we assert that art is political in some way—although we need to clarify in exactly what ways it is political—is there anything to be learned from those philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (...) who have argued for the universality of aesthetics? Feminists have produced a variety of answers to this question. In order to appreciate why and how the question has been answered so variously, we will need to understand something about the arguments that Kant put forward for the universality of aesthetics, and the relation between his view of aesthetic judgment and the other two domains of his critical philosophy, i.e. the metaphysical and the practical. We will also need to understand how and why, despite the severely problematic sexist, classist, and racist claims that Kant makes, his philosophy—in particular his aesthetics—remains a source of inspiration for some feminists and social-political philosophers. (shrink)

This article expands Patchen Markell’s seminal problematization of The Human Condition by examining the impact that the modern developments in science and technology had on Arendt’s signature categories. Whereas Markell is interested in the systematic “architecture” of the book, I attempt to historicize Arendt’s distinctions in light of the story she tells about science and technology. From the invention of the telescope to the splitting of the atom, technoscience has provoked shifts in the hierarchies within the vita activa; spawned new (...) varieties of “labor,” “work,” and “action”; and blurred the traditional boundaries between “nature” and the “human world.” These reconfigurations draw the contours of a new, “modern world” that is different from the world whose story and conceptual tradition Arendt set out to articulate. Largely as a result of the activities of science and technology, the experiences that informed the categories of the “Western tradition” correspond to a world that is no longer our own. (shrink)

Following the standard view, scientific theories are formal systems, which receive empirical content by way of certain correspondence rules. The task of philosophy of science is then to make explicit the structure of such systems. In contrast to this view, one can point to the French tradition in philosophy of science. What characterizes this tradition is recourse to historical study, which has evolved from an attempt to bridge the fields of philosophy of science and history of science by a closer (...) integration of conceptual and historical methods. My aim in this paper is to explore the emergence of historical epistemology in France and its later revival at an international level. Attention is directed at the presuppositions and motivations underlying such an approach. (shrink)

In mathematics, the deductive method reigns. Without proof, a claim remains unsolved, a mere conjecture, not something that can be simply assumed; when a proof is found, the problem is solved, it turns into a “result,” something that can be relied on. So mathematicians think. But is there more to mathematical justification than proof?The answer is an emphatic yes, as I explain in this chapter. I argue that non-deductive justification is in fact pervasive in mathematics, and that it is in (...) good epistemic standing. (shrink)

This paper attempts an historical analysis of a dream of the physicist George Gamow recorded shortly before his death in 1968. The dream is contextualized through Gamow's extended scientific work and popular scientific efforts, and in light of enduring preoccupations with the notion of a complete science. The analysis extends to an examination of the relationship of the dream to dreaming practices and deliberations apart from Gamow’s, as evident in the relationship and collaboration between the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and C. (...) G. Jung. (shrink)

The notion of local deduction theorem (which generalizes on the known instances of indeterminate deduction theorems, e.g. for the infinitely-valued ukasiewicz logic C ) is defined. It is then shown that a given finitary non-pathological logic C admits the local deduction theorem iff the class Matr(C) of all matrices validating C has the C-filter extension property (Theorem II.1).

In mathematics, the deductive method reigns. Without proof, a claim remains unsolved, a mere conjecture, not something that can be simply assumed; when a proof is found, the problem is solved, it turns into a “result,” something that can be relied on. So mathematicians think. But is there more to mathematical justification than proof? -/- The answer is an emphatic yes, as I explain in this article. I argue that non-deductive justification is in fact pervasive in mathematics, and that it (...) is in good epistemic standing. (shrink)

Deductive inference seems to reveal semantic connections between their premise(s) and conclusion that were there all along. This looks inconsistent with Wittgenstein's later views on meaning. The paper argues that W's treatment of aspects suggests a Wittgensteinian treatment of deduction that accommodates the troublesome phenomenon without conceding its force.

Epistemology, as generally understood by philosophers of science, is rather remote from the history of science and from historical concerns in general. Rheinberger shows that, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, a parallel, alternative discourse sought to come to terms with the rather fundamental experience of the thoroughgoing scientific changes brought on by the revolution in physics. Philosophers of science and historians of science alike contributed their share to what this essay describes as an ongoing quest to (...) historicize epistemology. Historical epistemology, in this sense, is not so concerned with the knowing subject and its mental capacities. Rather, it envisages science as an ongoing cultural endeavor and tries to assess the conditions under which the sciences in all their diversity take shape and change over time. (shrink)

We propose a new schema for the deduction theorem and prove that the deductive system S of a prepositional logic L fulfills the proposed schema if and only if there exists a finite set A(p, q) of propositional formulae involving only prepositional letters p and q such that A(p, p) L and p, A(p, q) s q.

By deduction, we often extend both our knowledge and our justified belief. Moreover, in achieving knowledge or justified belief of some proposition, we commonly acquire justification for believing many of its entailed consequences, such as at least some of those that self-evidently follow from it. These and related facts have led some philosophers to endorse strong closure principles, for instance: If a person, S, is justified in believing a proposition, p, and p entails q, then S is justified in (...) believing q. Others have denied such principles, whether for justification or, with the appropriate additions, for knowledge. The debate continues. There is, however, this much consensus: there are difficult problems about the scope of closure, and epistemology should develop theories that can resolve them. (shrink)

Mathematicians often speak of conjectures as being confirmed by evidence that falls short of proof. For their own conjectures, evidence justifies further work in looking for a proof. Those conjectures of mathematics that have long resisted proof, such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the Riemann Hypothesis, have had to be considered in terms of the evidence for and against them. It is argued here that it is not adequate to describe the relation of evidence to hypothesis as `subjective', `heuristic' or (...) `pragmatic', but that there must be an element of what it is rational to believe on the evidence, that is, of non-deductive logic. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Comparative Survey of Freedom, first published by Freedom House in 1973, is now the most widely used indicator of democracy by both academics and the U.S. government alike. However, literature examining the Survey’s origins is virtually nonexistent. In this article, I use archival records to challenge Freedom House’s retrospective account of the indicator’s creation. Rather than the outcome of a scientific methodology by multiple social scientists, the Survey was produced by a single political scientist, Raymond Gastil, according to his (...) own hunches and impressions. How, then, did this indicator rise to such prominence? I argue that the Survey’s notoriety can be attributed to its early promotion in both political science and American foreign policy decision-making, as well as the fact that it fit the dominant scientific and political paradigms of the time. (shrink)