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Michael Lynch
University of Connecticut
  1. Truth as one and many.Michael P. Lynch - 2009 - New York : Clarendon Press,: Clarendon Press.
    What is truth? Michael Lynch defends a bold new answer to this question. Traditional theories of truth hold that truth has only a single uniform nature. All truths are true in the same way. More recent deflationary theories claim that truth has no nature at all; the concept of truth is of no real philosophical importance. In this concise and clearly written book, Lynch argues that we should reject both these extremes and hold that truth is a functional property. To (...)
  2. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science.Michael Lynch - 1993 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have grown interested in the daily practices of scientists. Recent studies have drawn linkages between scientific innovations and more ordinary procedures, craft skills, and sources of sponsorship. These studies dispute the idea that science is the application of a unified method or the outgrowth of a progressive history of ideas. This book critically reviews arguments and empirical studies in two areas of sociology that have played a significant role in the 'sociological turn' in science (...)
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  3.  95
    True to Life: Why Truth Matters.Michael P. Lynch - 2004 - Cambridge: MIT Press.
    In this engaging and spirited text, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. He explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is.
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  4.  36
    Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data.Michael P. Lynch - 2016 - New York, NY, USA: WW Norton.
    An investigation into the way in which information technology has shaped how and what we know, from "Google-knowing" to privacy and social media.
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  5.  51
    Truth as One and Many * By Michael Lynch. [REVIEW]Michael Lynch - 2010 - Analysis 70 (1):191-193.
    In Truth as One and Many, Michael Lynch offers a new theory of truth. There are two kinds of theory of truth in the literature. On the one hand, we have logical theories, which seek to construct formal systems that are consistent, while also containing a predicate which have as many as possible of the properties which we ordinarily take the English predicate ‘is true’ to have; salient examples include Tarski’s and Kripke’s theories of truth. On the other hand, we (...)
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  6.  51
    Know-it-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture.Michael P. Lynch - 2020 - New York, NY, USA: WW Norton.
    Know-it-All Society is about how we form and maintain our political convictions, and the ways in which political ideologies, human psychology and technology conspire to make our society more dogmatic, less intellectually humble and ultimately less democratic.
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  7. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies.Edward Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch & Judy Wajcman (eds.) - 2007 - MIT Press.
     
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  8.  16
    Science After the Practice Turn in the Philosophy, History, and Social Studies of Science.Lena Soler, Sjoerd Zwart, Michael Lynch & Vincent Israel-Jost (eds.) - 2014 - New York: Routledge.
    In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of science, but (...)
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  9. True to Life: Why Truth Matters.Michael P. Lynch - 2004 - Philosophy 80 (314):601-604.
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  10. Epistemic circularity and epistemic incommensurability.Michael P. Lynch - forthcoming - Social Epistemology:262--77.
  11.  44
    Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity.Michael P. Lynch - 1998 - Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 1999 Academic debates about pluralism and truth have become increasingly polarized in recent years. One side embraces extreme relativism, deeming any talk of objective truth as philosophically naïve. The opposition, frequently arguing that any sort of relativism leads to nihilism, insists on an objective notion of truth according to which there is only one true story of the world. Both sides agree that there is no middle path. In Truth in Context, Michael Lynch argues (...)
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  12.  17
    Introduction to Harold Garfinkel's Ethnomethodological "Misreading" of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field.Clemens Eisenmann & Michael Lynch - 2021 - Human Studies 44 (1):1-17.
    This article is the editors’ introduction to the transcript of a lecture that Harold Garfinkel delivered to a seminar in 1993. Garfinkel extensively discusses the relevance of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenological treatment of Gestalt theory for ethnomethodology. Garfinkel uses the term “misreading” to signal a respecification of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological investigations, and particularly his conceptions of contextures, functional significations, and phenomenal fields, so that they become compatible with detailed observations and descriptions of social actions and interactions performed in situ. Garfinkel begins with (...)
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  13. ReWrighting Pluralism.Michael P. Lynch - 2006 - The Monist 89 (1):63–84.
  14.  65
    After the Spade Turns: Disagreement, First Principles and Epistemic Contractarianism.Michael P. Lynch - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (2-3):248-259.
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  15. The externalized retina: Selection and mathematization in the visual documentation of objects in the life sciences. [REVIEW]Michael Lynch - 1988 - Human Studies 11 (2-3):201 - 234.
  16. The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives.Michael P. Lynch (ed.) - 2001 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  17.  60
    Varieties of Deep Epistemic Disagreement.Paul Simard Smith & Michael Patrick Lynch - 2020 - Topoi 40 (5):971-982.
    In this paper we discuss three different kinds of disagreement that have been, or could reasonably be, characterized as deep disagreements. Principle level disagreements are disagreements over the truth of epistemic principles. Sub-principle level deep disagreements are disagreements over how to assign content to schematic norms. Finally, framework-level disagreements are holistic disagreements over meaning not truth, that is over how to understand networks of epistemic concepts and the beliefs those concepts compose. Within the context of each of these kinds of (...)
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  18. True to Life: Why Truth Matters.Michael Lynch & Maria Baghramian - 2006 - Philosophical Quarterly 56 (222):137-140.
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  19. Truth and multiple realizability.Michael P. Lynch - 2004 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3):384 – 408.
    Pluralism about truth is the view that there is more than one way for a proposition to be true. When taken to imply that there is more than one concept and property of truth, this position faces a number of troubling objections. I argue that we can overcome these objections, and yet retain pluralism's key insight, by taking truth to be a multiply realizable property of propositions.
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  20. A Functionalist Theory of Truth.Michael P. Lynch - 2001 - In The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. pp. 723--750.
  21.  60
    In Praise of Reason.Michael Patrick Lynch - 2012 - MIT Press.
    Can we give objective reasons for our most basic standards of reason-- our fundamental epistemic principles? I argue, against several forms of skepticism about reason, that we can, but that the reasons we can give for epistemic principles are ultimately practical, not epistemic.
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  22. The values of truth and the truth of values.Michael P. Lynch - 2009 - In Pritchard, Haddock & MIllar (eds.), Epistemic Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 225--42.
     
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  23. Arrogance, truth and public discourse.Michael Patrick Lynch - 2018 - Episteme 15 (3):283-296.
    ABSTRACTDemocracies, Dewey and others have argued, are ideally spaces of reasons – they allow for an exchange of reasons both practical and epistemic by those willing to engage in that discourse. That requires that citizens have convictions they believe in, but it also requires that they be willing to listen to each other. This paper examines how a particular psychological attitude, “epistemic arrogance,” can undermine the achievement of these goals. The paper presents an analysis of this attitude and then examines (...)
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  24. Representation in Scientific Practice.Ronald N. Giere, Michael Lynch & Steve Woolgar - 1994 - Biology and Philosophy 9 (1):113-120.
  25. Truth, value and epistemic expressivism.Michael P. Lynch - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (1):76-97.
  26. From one to many: recent work on truth.Jeremy Wyatt & Michael Lynch - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (4):323-340.
    In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common "pluralizing tendency" with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated (...)
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  27. Epistemic commitments, epistemic agency and practical reasons.Michael P. Lynch - 2013 - Philosophical Issues 23 (1):343-362.
    In this paper, I raise two questions about epistemic commitments, and thus, indirectly, about our epistemic agency. Can we rationally defend such commitments when challenged to do so? And if so, how?
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  28.  50
    Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge.Michael Lynch - 2000 - Theory, Culture and Society 17 (3):26-54.
    Reflexivity is a well-established theoretical and methodological concept in the human sciences, and yet it is used in a confusing variety of ways. The meaning of `reflexivity' and the virtues ascribed to the concept are relative to particular theoretical and methodological commitments. This article examines several versions of the concept, and critically focuses on treatments of reflexivity as a mark of distinction or source of methodological advantage. Although reflexivity often is associated with radical epistemologies, social scientists with more conventional leanings (...)
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  29.  16
    Reverting to a hidden interactional order: Epistemics, informationism, and conversation analysis.Jean Wong & Michael Lynch - 2016 - Discourse Studies 18 (5):526-549.
    This article critically examines the relations between epistemics in conversation analysis and linguistic and cognitivist conceptions of communicative interaction that emphasize information and information transfer. The epistemic program adheres to the focus on recorded instances of talk-in-interaction that is characteristic of CA, explicitly identifies its theoretical origins with ethnomethodology, and points to implications of its research for the social distribution of knowledge. However, despite such affiliations with CA and ethnomethodology, the EP is cognitivist in the way it emphasizes information exchange (...)
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  30. Epistemic Circularity and Epistemic Disagreement.Michael P. Lynch - 2010 - In Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Social Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
  31. The Truth of Values and the Values of Truth'.Michael Lynch - 2009 - In Pritchard, Haddock & MIllar (eds.), Epistemic Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
     
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  32.  95
    Neuromedia, extended knowledge and understanding.Michael Patrick Lynch - 2014 - Philosophical Issues 24 (1):299-313.
    Imagine you had the functions of your smartphone miniaturized to a cellular level and accessible by your neural network. Reflection on this possibility suggests that we should not just concern ourselves with whether our knowledge is extending “out” to our devices; our devices are extending in, and with them, possibly the information that they bring. If so, then the question of whether knowledge is “extended” becomes wrapped up with the question of whether knowing is something we do, or something we (...)
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  33.  63
    Three questions for truth pluralism.Michael P. Lynch - 2013 - In Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen & Cory Wright (eds.), Truth and Pluralism: Current Debates. Oxford University Press. pp. 21.
  34. Truth and realism.Patrick Greenough & Michael Patrick Lynch (eds.) - 2006 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Is truth objective or relative? What exists independently of our minds? The essays in this book debate these two questions, which are among the oldest of philosophical issues and have vexed almost every major philosopher, from Plato, to Kant, to Wittgenstein. Fifteen eminent contributors bring fresh perspectives, renewed energy, and original answers to debates of great interest both within philosophy and in the culture at large.
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  35.  70
    Extending Wittgenstein: The pivotal move from epistemology to the sociology of science.Michael Lynch - 1992 - In Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture. University of Chicago Press. pp. 215--265.
  36.  18
    Truth, Value and Epistemic Expressivism.Michael P. Lynch - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (1):76-97.
  37.  59
    Minimalism and the Value of Truth.Michael P. Lynch - 2004 - Philosophical Quarterly 54 (217):497 - 517.
    Minimalists generally see themselves as engaged in a descriptive project. They maintain that they can explain everything we want to say about truth without appealing to anything other than the T-schema, i.e., the idea that the proposition that p is true iff p. I argue that despite recent claims to the contrary, minimalists cannot explain one important belief many people have about truth, namely, that truth is good. If that is so, then minimalism, and possibly deflationism as a whole, must (...)
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  38.  76
    Memes, Misinformation, and Political Meaning.Michael P. Lynch - 2022 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (1):38-56.
    Are most people sincere when they share misinformation and conspiracies online? This question, while natural and important, is difficult to answer for obvious reasons. But it also applies poorly to one of the main vehicles for misinformation—memes. And it can be ambiguous; as a result, we should be mindful of two distinctions. First, a distinction between belief and a related propositional attitude, commitment. And second, the distinction between the propositional content of an attitude and what I will call its political (...)
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  39. Alethic Functionalism and Our Folk Theory of Truth: A Reply to Cory Wright.Michael P. Lynch - 2005 - Synthese 145 (1):29-43.
    According to alethic functionalism, truth is a higher-order multiply realizable property of propositions. After briefly presenting the views main principles and motivations, I defend alethic functionalism from recent criticisms raised against it by Cory Wright. Wright argues that alethic functionalism will collapse either into deflationism or into a view that takes true as simply ambiguous. I reject both claims.
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  40.  42
    In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy.Michael Patrick Lynch - 2012 - MIT Press.
    Why does reason matter, if in the end everything comes down to blind faith or gut instinct? Why not just go with what you believe even if it contradicts the evidence? Why bother with rational explanation when name-calling, manipulation, and force are so much more effective in our current cultural and political landscape? Michael Lynch's In Praise of Reason offers a spirited defense of reason and rationality in an era of widespread skepticism--when, for example, people reject scientific evidence about such (...)
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  41. Pragmatism and the Price of Truth.Michael P. Lynch - 2015 - In Steven Gross, Michael Williams & Nicholas Tebben (eds.), Meaning Without Representation: Essays on Truth, Expression, Normativity, and Naturalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 245-261.
    Like William James before him, Huw Price has influentially argued that truth has a normative role to play in our thought and talk. I agree. But Price also thinks that we should regard truth-conceived of as property of our beliefs-as something like a metaphysical myth. Here I disagree. In this paper, I argue that reflection on truth's values pushes us in a slightly different direction, one that opens the door to certain metaphysical possibilities that even a Pricean pragmatist can love.
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  42.  7
    The epistemics of Epistemics: An introduction.Douglas Macbeth & Michael Lynch - 2016 - Discourse Studies 18 (5):493-499.
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  43. Truth as a Democratic Value.Michael Lynch - 2021 - Nomos 64:2-23.
  44. Science in the age of mechanical reproduction: Moral and epistemic relations between diagrams and photographs. [REVIEW]Michael Lynch - 1991 - Biology and Philosophy 6 (2):205-226.
    Sociologists, philosophers and historians of science are gradually recognizing the importance of visual representation. This is part of a more general movement away from a theory-centric view of science and towards an interest in practical aspects of observation and experimentation. Rather than treating science as a matter of demonstrating the logical connection between theoretical and empirical statements, an increasing number of investigations are examining how scientists compose and use diagrams, graphs, photographs, micrographs, maps, charts, and related visual displays. This paper (...)
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  45. Introduction.Alessandra Tanesini & Michael P. Lynch - 2020 - In Alessandra Tanesini & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Polarisation, Arrogance, and Dogmatism: Philosophical Perspectives. Routledge.
     
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  46.  17
    Comment on Martin Hammersley, “Is ‘Representation’ a Folk Term?”.Michael Lynch - 2022 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 52 (4):258-267.
    Hammersley asserts that “radical” strands of ethnomethodology and constructionism in science and technology studies (STS) take an anti-representationalist approach which denies that “science produces representations referring to objects or processes that exist independently of it.” In this ‘Comment,’ I argue that ethnomethodology is distinct from both constructionist and post-constructionist research programs in STS, and that Hammersley presents a binary choice between being for or against the general proposition that scientific representations correspond to independent realities. He suggests that STS studies should (...)
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  47.  6
    Transposing Gestalt Phenomena from Visual Fields to Practical and Interactional Work: Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ Social Praxeology.Michael Lynch & Clemens Eisenmann - forthcoming - Philosophia Scientiae:95-122.
    In lectures and writings in the decades following the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology [1967], Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, developed what he called a “misreading” of the phenomenological writings of Aron Gurwitsch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Garfinkel’s “misreading” included a selective and creative treatment of themes that Gurwitsch drew from Gestalt psychology, such as figure-ground, Gestalt contexture, and the phenomenal field. Rather than identifying these themes with visual perception demonstrated with picture-puzzles (for example, of animals hidden in foliage) (...)
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  48. Understanding and Coming to Understand.Michael Lynch - 2017 - In Stephen R. Grimm (ed.), Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding. Oxford University Press.
    Many philosophers take understanding to be a distinctive kind of knowledge that involves grasping dependency relations; moreover, they hold it to be particularly valuable. This paper aims to investigate and address two well-known puzzles that arise from this conception: (1) the nature of understanding itself—in particular, the nature of “grasping”; (2) the source of understanding’s distinctive value. In what follows, I’ll argue that we can shed light on both puzzles by recognizing first, the importance of the distinction between the act (...)
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  49.  84
    Does Logical Pluralism Imply, or Suggest, Truth Pluralism, or Vice Versa?Stewart Shapiro & Michael Lynch - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 20):4925-4936.
    The answers to the questions in the title depend on the kind of pluralism one is talking about. We will focus here on our own views. The purpose of this article is to trace out some possible connections between these kinds of pluralism. We show how each of them might bear on the other, depending on how certain open questions are resolved.
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  50. A coherent moral relativism.David Capps, Michael P. Lynch & Daniel Massey - 2009 - Synthese 166 (2):413 - 430.
    Moral relativism is an attractive position, but also one that it is difficult to formulate. In this paper, we propose an alternative way of formulating moral relativism that locates the relativity of morality in the property that makes moral claims true. Such an approach, we believe, has significant advantages over other possible ways of formulating moral relativism. We conclude by considering a few problems such a position might face.
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