I argue that the central conflict between epistemic and ontic versions of structural realism concerns whether it is possible to read off ontology from current fundamental science. Even if we assume that structures are metaphysically superior to objects, the possibility of reading off ontology from current fundamental science remains unjustified. I show that the conclusion as regards to the reading off ontology in the ontic version is already assumed in one of (...) the premises; hence the argument begs the question. As a result, the problem of ontological discontinuity implied in the pessimistic meta-induction argument remains intact in ontic structural realism. (shrink)

A ‘duality’ is a formal mapping between the spaces of solutions of two empirically equivalent theories. In recent times, dualities have been found to be pervasive in string theory and quantum field theory. Naïvely interpreted, duality-related theories appear to make very different ontological claims about the world—differing in e.g. space-time structure, fundamental ontology, and mereological structure. In light of this, duality-related theories raise questions familiar from discussions of underdetermination in the philosophy of science: in the presence of (...) dual theories, what is one to say about the ontology of the world? In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive and non-technical survey of the landscape of possible ontological interpretations of duality-related theories. We provide a significantly enriched and clarified taxonomy of options—several of which are novel to the literature. (shrink)

Models of cultural evolution need to address not only the organizational aspects of human societies, but also the complexity and structure of cultural idea systems that frame their systems of organization. These cultural idea systems determine a framework within which behaviors take place and provide mutually understood meanings for behavior from the perspective of both agent and recipient that are critical for the coherence of human systems of social organization.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sharon O'Dair FREELOADING OFF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES In Profession 89, published by the MLA, Martin Mueller complains that the fashion for interdisciplinary work in literary studies is mostly an intradepartmental affair. In English departments interdisciplinary work results not in cross-fertilization between disciplines but in the establishment ofsubdisciplines within English. To support his assertions, Mueller focuses on the efforts of new historicists, most of which, he claims, would not pass (...) muster in history departments orjournals.1 But literary critics who import from sociology or psychology can be arraigned on the same charge; seldom do they engage sociologists or psychologists in the way envisioned by Mueller, that is, intensely. Ifthey did, the subdisciplines would not be defined as narrowly as they are; Marxism would not dominate our sociology of literature and psychoanalysis would not dominate our psychology of literature. If they did, critics would better understand the norms of science and thus be less likely to appropriate terms and theories for use outside the specialized arenas for which they were designed. And, to anticipate my conclusion, critics might then be less likely to further what psychologist Liam Hudson calls his discipline's "psychic engineering." My concern with how literary critics use social science results from grappling with the problem myself. Like most critics, I used to be rather uncritical in my borrowings from social science, figuring that ifit works, it works, and being, no doubt, somewhat off-put by the notion of "science." But as I read sociology and psychology on the problem of the self/subject, I became troubled by the way science structures discourse on the problem ofthe selfor subject and its relationship to surrounding environments. What do these discourses include and leave out? What are their boundaries? What is the status of the images of men and Philosophy and Literature, © 1991, 15: 260-267 Sharon O'Dair261 women offered by them? These are questions thatought tobe addressed by literary critics, but seldom are. To be more specific: although literary critics borrow heavily from the social sciences, most notably, of course, from those derived from the work of Marx and Freud, we do not often acknowledge the limits of the scientific discourses from which we borrow. Sociological "man" (the alienated role-player)—like psychological "man" (one pushed by drives and molded by stimuli) or economic "man" (the rational optimizer)— is an abstract and artificial description, a construct, useful as a tool in scientific analysis. As such, homo sociologicus or homo psychologicus maintains heuristic strength, but neither is intended to capture the whole of a human being or to account for the entirety of determining and enabling influences on him or her. Neither is a philosophy of human nature, and certainly neither was offered by social scientists to account for the creations of Kafka or Shakespeare. Ralf Dahrendorf has observed that "man in his entirety not only is safely removed from the attack ofany single discipline, but may possibly remain forever a nebulous shape in the background of scientific endeavor."2 Generalizing that point, Kenneth Burke explains that "insofar as any science has a nomenclature especially adapted to its particular field of study, the extension of its special terms to provide a definition in general would necessarily oversociologize, overbiologize, overpsychologize, or overphysicize, etc., its subject."3 So, in general, the social sciences, like the physical sciences from which they draw methodological inspiration, aim not to describe reality but to construct categories that allow each social science to capture a certain part, and only a certain part, ofreality in analysis. To get on with thejob, the sociologist controls for the fact of individuality—what is personal or unique in human beings—just as to get on with thejob, the psychologist controls for the fact ofsociety—what is social in human beings. Each discipline simplifies its notion of a person to proceed as science. As an object of study in much social science of this century and the last, a person is necessarily quite different from a person one meets on the streets, in a city or town. To the sociologist, then, if I may focus my argument, the person is nothing but his or her social roles. Erving Goffman, therefore... (shrink)

This paper considers whether there can be any such thing as a naturalized metaphysics of color—any distillation of the commitments of perceptual science with regard to color ontology. I first make some observations about the kinds of philosophical commitments that sometimes bubble to the surface in the psychology and neuroscience of color. Unsurprisingly, because of the range of opinions expressed, an ontology of color cannot simply be read off from scientists’ definitions and theoretical statements. I next (...) consider two alternative routes. First, conceptual pluralism inspired by Mark Wilson's analysis of scientific representation. I argue that these findings leave the prospects for a naturalized color ontology rather dim. Second, I outline a naturalized epistemology of perception. I ask how the correctness and informativeness of perceptual states is understood by contemporary perceptual science. I argue that the detectionist ideal of correspondence should be replaced by the pragmatic ideal of usefulness. I argue that this result has significant implications for the metaphysics of color. (shrink)

This paper considers whether there can be any such thing as a naturalized metaphysics of color—any distillation of the commitments of perceptual science with regard to color ontology. I first make some observations about the kinds of philosophical commitments that sometimes bubble to the surface in the psychology and neuroscience of color. Unsurprisingly, because of the range of opinions expressed, an ontology of color cannot simply be read off from scientists’ definitions and theoretical statements. I next (...) consider two alternative routes. First, conceptual pluralism inspired by Mark Wilson's analysis of scientific representation. I argue that these findings leave the prospects for a naturalized color ontology rather dim. Second, I outline a naturalized epistemology of perception. I ask how the correctness and informativeness of perceptual states is understood by contemporary perceptual science. I argue that the detectionist ideal of correspondence should be replaced by the pragmatic ideal of usefulness. I argue that this result has significant implications for the metaphysics of color. (shrink)

The term “deep history” refers to historical accounts framed temporally not by the advent of a written record but by evolutionary events (Smail 2008; Shryock and Smail 2011). The presumption of deep history is that the events of today have a history that traces back beyond written history to events in the evolutionary past. For human kinship, though, even forming a history of kinship, let alone a deep history, remains problematic, given limited, relevant data (Trautman et al. 2011). With regard (...) to a deep history, one conjecture is that human kinship evolved from primate social systems in a gradual, more-or-less continuous manner (see Chapais 2008); another conjecture is that kinship, in accordance with the incest account of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) or the fanciful, tetradic account of Nicholas J. Allen (1986), “comes into existence with a leap” (Trautman et al. 2011: 176); and yet another, the account to be developed in this paper, is that kinship, as it is understood and lived by culture bearers today, is the consequence of a profound and qualitative evolutionary transformation going from an ancestral primate-like social system predicated on extensive face-to-face interaction to the relation-based social systems that characterize human societies (Read 2012). (shrink)

Anti-exceptionalism about logic is the doctrine that logic does not require its own epistemology, for its methods are continuous with those of science. Although most recently urged by Williamson, the idea goes back at least to Lakatos, who wanted to adapt Popper's falsicationism and extend it not only to mathematics but to logic as well. But one needs to be careful here to distinguish the empirical from the a posteriori. Lakatos coined the term 'quasi-empirical' `for the counterinstances to (...) putative mathematical and logical theses. Mathematics and logic may both be a posteriori, but it does not follow that they are empirical. Indeed, as Williamson has demonstrated, what counts as empirical knowledge, and the role of experience in acquiring knowledge, are both unclear. Moreover, knowledge, even of necessary truths, is fallible. Nonetheless, logical consequence holds in virtue of the meaning of the logical terms, just as consequence in general holds in virtue of the meanings of the concepts involved; and so logic is both analytic and necessary. In this respect, it is exceptional. But its methodologyand its epistemology are the same as those of mathematics and science in being fallibilist, and counterexamples to seemingly analytic truths are as likely as those in any scientic endeavour. What is needed is a new account of the evidential basis of knowledge, one which is, perhaps surprisingly, found in Aristotle. (shrink)

Engaging with the question of the extent to which the so-called human, economic or social sciences are actually sciences, this book moves away from the search for a criterion or definition that will allow us to sharply distinguish the scientific from the non-scientific. Instead, the book favours the pursuit of clarity with regard to the various enterprises undertaken by human beings, with a view to dissolving the felt need for such a demarcation. In other words, Read pursues a (...) ‘therapeutic’ approach to the issue of the status and nature of these subjects. Discussing the work of Kuhn, Winch and Wittgenstein in relation to fundamental question of methodology, Wittgenstein among the Sciences undertakes an examination of the nature of (natural) science itself, in the light of which a series of successive cases of putatively scientific disciplines are analysed. A novel and significant contribution to social science methodology and the philosophy of science and ‘the human sciences’, this book will be of interest to social scientists and philosophers, as well as to psychiatrists, economists and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

For Knox, ‘spacetime’ is to be defined functionally, as that which picks out a structure of local inertial frames. Assuming that Knox is motivated to construct this functional definition of spacetime on the grounds that it appears to identify that structure which plays theoperationalrole of spacetime—i.e., that structure which is actually surveyed by physical rods and clocks built from matter fields—we identify in this paper important limitations of her approach: these limitations are based upon the fact that there is (...) a gap between inertial frame structure and that which is operationally significant in the above sense. We present five concrete cases in which these two notions come apart, before considering various ways in which Knox’s spacetime functionalism might be amended in light of these issues. (shrink)

Does the gravitational field described in general relativity possess genuine stress-energy? We answer this question in the affirmative, in a weak sense applicable in a certain class of frames of a certain class of models of the theory, and arguably also in a strong sense, applicable in all frames of all models of the theory. In addition, we argue that one can be a realist about gravitational stress-energy in general relativity even if one is a relationist about spacetime ontology. (...) In each case, our reasoning rests upon a functionalist approach to the definition of physical quantities. (shrink)

For the last three decades, the discussion on Hilary Putnam’s provocative suggestions around the issue of realism has raged widely. Putnam’s various formulations of, and arguments for, what he called internal realism in contrast to what he called metaphysical realism have been scrutinised from a variety of perspectives. One angle of attack has been missing, though: the view from the social sciences and the ontology of society. This perspective, I believe, will provide further confirmation to the observation (...) that Putnam’s two concepts of realism are all too aggregative in that they conflate elements that had better be kept distinct, at least for many important purposes (e.g. Niiniluoto 1996). The present essay can be read as an argument for a topic-specific examination of realism. This means that it challenges the overall validity of Richard Boyd’s arguments against what he calls “realism about”, that is, against “a certain fragmented conception of scientific realism, one according to which realism is deeply topic specific” (Boyd 1990, p. 175). Boyd takes the ‘x’ in realism about x” to designate two kinds of things: entities postulated in scientific theories (“realism about the ether” and “realism about higher taxa”) and scientific disciplines (“realism about physics” and “realism about biology”) (ibid., pp. 175, 190). He also suggests that “it seems possible cogently to accept realism about the natural sciences while denying it about at least some of the social sciences” (ibid., p. 191). In Boyd’s view, the possibility of realism about social sciences is undermined by their weak instrumental success; it is the instrumental reliability of method that he takes as the basis for a realist account of science. I do not underwrite this connection between realism and instrumental success, thus I am not compelled to reject realism about social sciences on these grounds; and, as we shall see, social sciences have other peculiarities as well (see Mäki 1996). I think we should, at least to some degree, disaggregate and relativize the issue of realism. I do have sympathy with Boyd’s strategic arguments against “realisms about”, but yet I believe realists will be better off by adopting a more concrete and localized approach to the issue (Mäki 2005). Social objects and social sciences deserve a separate treatment. There are two strategies that can be followed in examining a realism about x (type of entity, theory, discipline). One is to first fix the meaning of realism’ and then specify the extension of ‘x’. This is Boyd’s strategy. The other is to fix some part of the extension of ‘x’ and then adjust the meaning of ‘realism’ so as to accommodate whatever peculiarities the x in question may have (and finally to check whether the adjusted meaning of ‘realism’ meets the criteria of a minimal notion of realism; it would be here that we encounter a relatively fixed idea of some minimal realism, or a set of realist intuitions). The latter is my approach here. I begin with the interconnected ideas of “realism about social objects” andrealism about social sciences”. I am not only interested in what comes after ‘about’; I am also interested in what goes before it, namely ‘realism’ itself. Here is one premise of the discussion: the issue of proper forms of realism for dealing with specific problems is an issue to be settled at least partly a posteriori. Here is the problem for which a solution will be sought: what constraints, if any, does what we know about the social sciences and society (as depicted by the social sciences and our commonsense views) impose upon the forms of realism that can justifiably be adopted about them? This paper suggests to offer only some partial insight into this issue. It seeks to do so indirectly by discussing Putnam’s characterizations of internal and metaphysical realism. The focus will be on two aspects of Putnam’s realisms: [1] the role and kinds of independence and dependence (in relation to the human mind and related things); and [2] the possibility of error. It is shown that the nature of social objects has implications concerning the appropriate constraints on [1] and [2], and thereby on the kinds of realism that are available to social scientists. (shrink)

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism both challenge representationist cognitive science, but the two approaches have only begun to engage in dialogue. Further conceptual clarification is required in which differences are as important as common ground. This paper enters the dialogue by focusing on important differences. After a brief account of the parallel histories of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism, we cover incompatibility between them regarding their theories of sensation and perception. First, we show how and why in ecological theory perception is, (...) crucially, not based on sensation. We elucidate this idea by examining the biological roots of work in the two fields, concentrating on Gibson and Varela and Maturana. We expound an ecological critique of any sensation-based approach to perception by detailing two topics: classic retinal image theories and perception in single-celled organisms. The second main point emphasizes the importance of the idea of organism-environment mutuality and its difference from structural coupling of sensations and motor behavior. We point out how ecological - phenomenological methods of inquiry grow out of mutualism and compare Gibson’s idea of visual kinesthesis to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body. Third, we conclude that Ecological Psychology and varieties of Enactivism are laying down different paths to pursue related goals. Thus, convergence of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism is not possible given their conflicting assumptions, but cross-fertilization is possible and desirable. (shrink)

Critics of empathy—the capacity to share the mental lives of others—have charged that empathy is intrinsically biased. It occurs between no more than two people, and its key function is arguably to coordinate and align feelings, thoughts, and responses between those who are often already in close personal relationships. Because of this, critics claim that empathy is morally unnecessary at best and morally harmful at worst. This paper argues, however, that it is precisely because of its ability to connect people (...) by coordinating and aligning their feelings, thoughts, and responses, that empathy is especially well suited to perform one particular moral task that has been largely overlooked in moral philosophical discussions. That is, helping people, including those who are antagonistically opposed on matters of moral, social, and political importance—what I call antagonistic moral opponents—find common ground: a set of shared beliefs, attitudes, values, or experiences that lays the requisite ground for even minimally positive relationships. Doing so can contribute to a number of morally, practically, and epistemically important outcomes, including resolving fraught disagreements, mitigating antagonism, promoting cooperation, learning from differences, and even forging positive relationships of various sorts. Contra critics, I therefore maintain that empathy is important for at least one area of the moral life. (shrink)

No final statement can be made regarding the relations between science and policy-making. Knowledge, values, and techniques are interrelated, cumulative, and constantly changing. They are derived from man's responses to the complicated interactions between physical, biological, and cultural phenomena. Final answers are impossible because the answers themselves are part of the world and therefore are factors in changing it. We see through a glass darkly, whether it be the giant glass of Palomar or the eye-piece of the electron (...) microscope. (shrink)

In the main bulk of this chapter, I offer a Wittgensteinian take on infinity and deduce from this some Wittgensteinian criticisms of Chomsky on ‘creativity’, treating this as one among many examples of how metaphors, following the understanding of Lakoff and Johnson, following Wittgenstein, can delude one into metaphysics. As per my title, ‘metaphysics’ turns out to be, really, nothing other than metaphorics in disguise. Our aim in philosophy, then, is to turn latent metaphors into patent metaphors. When we (...) do this, the charm of metaphysics evaporates. Or again, its charm, if still felt, is properly contextualised: ‘metaphysics’ becomes at best a kind of accidental or un-self-aware poetry, rather than something like a super- or supra-science. (shrink)

This is the first introductory anthology on the philosophy of ecology edited by an ecologist and a philosopher. It illustrates the range of philosophical approaches available to ecologists and provides a basis for understanding the thinking on which many of today's environmental ideas are founded. Collectively, these seminal readings make a powerful statement on the value of ecological knowledge and thinking in alleviating the many problems of modern industrial civilization. Issues covered include: the challenges of defining scientific ecology, tracing its (...) genealogy, and distinguishing the science from various forms of "ecological-like" thinking the ontology of ecological entities and processes selected concepts of community, stability, diversity, and niche the methodology of ecology (rationalism and empiricism, reductionism and holism) the significance of evolutionary law for ecological science. (shrink)

A common adage runs that, given a theory manifesting symmetries, the syntax of that theory should be modified in order to construct a new theory, from which symmetry-variant structure of the original theory has been excised. Call this strategy for explicating the underlying ontology of symmetry-related models reduction. Recently, Dewar has proposed an alternative to reduction as a means of articulating the ontology of symmetry-related models—what he calls sophistication, in which the semantics of the original theory is (...) modified, and symmetry-related models of that theory are treated as if they are isomorphic. In this paper, we undertake a critical evaluation of sophistication about symmetries—we find the programme underdeveloped in a number of regards. In addition, we clarify the interplay between sophistication about symmetries, and a separate debate to which Dewar has contributed—viz., that between interpretational versus motivational approaches to symmetry transformations. (shrink)

Is there a scientific revolution taking place in economics? This piece seeks to apply the thinking of Wittgenstein and of the major philosopher of science who was, I have argued elsewhere, most influenced by him—Kuhn—to the emergence of ‘ecological economics’.

Is there a scientific revolution taking place in economics? This piece seeks to apply the thinking of Wittgenstein and of the major philosopher of science who was, I have argued elsewhere, most influenced by him—Kuhn—to the emergence of ‘ecological economics’.

I argue that the type of progress exhibited by philosophy is not that exhibited by science, but rather is akin to the kind of progress exhibited be someone becoming ‘older and wiser’. However, as actually-existing philosophy has gotten older, it has not always gotten wiser. As an illustration, I consider Rawls's conception of justification. I argue that Rawls's notion of what it is to have a philosophical justification exhibits no progress at all from Euthyphro's. In fact, drawing on (...) a remark of Wittgenstein's, I suggest that Rawls's conception is inferior to the situation as depicted in Plato's famous dialogue – because at least in the case of Plato's Euthyphro, there is no illusion of justification. (shrink)

Maintaining systems of military plans is critical for military effectiveness, but is also challenging. Plans will become obsolete as the world diverges from the assumptions on which they rest. If too many ad hoc changes are made to intermeshed plans, the ensemble may no longer lead to well-synchronized and coordinated operations, resulting in the system of plans becoming itself incoherent. We describe in what follows an Adaptive Planning process that we are developing on behalf of the Air Force Research (...) Laboratory (Rome) with the goal of addressing problems of these sorts through cyclical collaborative plan review and maintenance. The interactions of world state, blue force status and associated plans are too complex for manual adaptive processes, and computer-aided plan review and maintenance is thus indispensable. We argue that appropriate semantic technology can 1) provide richer representation of plan-related data and semantics, 2) allow for flexible, non-disruptive, agile, scalable, and coordinated changes in plans, and 3) support more intelligent analytical querying of plan-related data. (shrink)

Jones' proposed application of Optimality Theory assumes the primary kinship data are genealogical definitions of kin terms. This, however, ignores the fact that these definitions can be predicted from the computational, algebralike structural logic of kinship terminologies, as has been discussed and demonstrated in numerous publications. The richness of human kinship systems derives from the cultural knowledge embedded in kinship terminologies as symbolic computation systems, not the post hoc constraints devised by Jones.

Darwinian evolution, defined as evolution arising from selection based directly on the properties of individuals, does not account for cultural constructs providing the organizational basis of human societies. The difficulty with linking Darwinian evolution to structural properties of cultural constructs is exemplified with kinship terminologies, a cultural construct that structures and delineates the domain of kin in human societies. (Published Online November 9 2006).

We make some remarks on the mathematics and metaphysics of the hole argument, in response to a recent article in this journal by Weatherall ([2018]). Broadly speaking, we defend the mainstream philosophical literature from the claim that correct usage of the mathematics of general relativity `blocks' the argument.

The Zofingia Club was a discussion group to which C.G. Jung belonged as a medical student: in 1897 he became Chairman, and gave five lectures. These have survived and are published here in a supplementary volume to the _Collected Works._ The lectures are of great interest to anyone concerned with Jung's early ideas, as a young medical student from a strongly Swiss Protestant background. The Lectures are: The Border Zones of Exact Science ; Some Thoughts on Psychology ; (...) An Inaugural Address on Becoming Chairman of the Zofingia Club; Thoughts on the Nature and Value of Speculative Inquiry ; and Thoughts on the Interpretation of Christianity with Reference to the Theory of Albrecht Ritschl. (shrink)

This commentary on Søren Riis’s paper “Dwelling in-between walls” starts from a position of solidarity with its attempt to build a postphenomenological perspective on architecture and the built environment. It proposes however that a clearer view of a technological structure of experience may be obtained by finding technological-perceptual wholes that incorporate perceiver and perceived as well as the mediating apparatus. Parts and wholes may be formed as nested human-technological interiorities that have structured relations with what is outside—so that the (...) outside constitutes an interiority in its turn which contextualises and situates the first. This nested structure raises questions about the way architects and urbanists see the built environment and understand inhabitation. It is hoped that this effort continues with conceptual and empirical work to research ways to make the human places of our built environment. (shrink)

Personal utilitarianism applies act-utilitarianism to the problem of individual choice. It is based on the view that the good life is achieved through maximizing the sum of individual measures of utility over a population. the population being the sequence of semi-autonomous selves from which the individual is composed. I begin by showing how our lives can usefully be partitioned into selves because the weights put on our various choice motives are constantly changing and, consequently, our preferences themselves concerning what (...) we should choose at any given time can also change from moment-to-moment. In particular, because we put disproportionate weight on our present needs relative to our future ones, we often become impatient and choose options that offer immediate gratification. I use concepts from game theory to describe multiple selves, and to discuss how strategic interactions between selves are possible, and then conclude by considering the practical problem of how to achieve the good life, or how can we get our selves to choose what is best for us in the long run. (shrink)

While for Louis Althusser ideology was very much an affair of the unconscious, it fell to his Spanish student, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, to fully articulate the concept of the ‘ideological unconscious’ per se, the latter understood as secreted by the relations of production operative respectively within the various modes of production. Rodrí-guez elucidates the workings of this unconscious through the associated notion of an ideological matrix, with particular reference to the transition from ‘substantialism’, the dominant ideology of feudalism, to (...) ‘animism’, the earliest form of bourgeois ideology. Bourgeois ideology is understood as turning crucially upon the opposition between ‘society’ and the free‘individual’, free to exploit and be exploited. The present paper assesses the challenge the Spaniard’s work poses to those intellectual traditions, which include critical realism and some versions of Marxism, that take ‘society’ and the ‘individual’ to be ontological realities. (shrink)

Consensus in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that conserved quantity theories of causation such as that of Dowe [2000]—according to which causation is to be analysed in terms of the exchange of conserved quantities (e.g., energy)—face damning problems when confronted with contemporary physics, where the notion of conservation becomes delicate. In particular, in general relativity it is often claimed that there simply are no conservation laws for (say) total-stress energy. If this claim is correct, it is difficult to see (...) how conserved quantity theories of causation could survive. In this article, we resist the above consensus and defend conserved quantity theories from this conclusion, at least when focusing on the apparent problems posed by general relativity. We argue that this approach to causation can continue to be defended in general relativity, once one appreciates (a) the availability of approximate symmetries in generic general relativistic spacetimes, and (b) the role of modelling and idealisation in that theory. Given these points, conserved quantity theories of causation must stand or fall on other grounds. (shrink)

The ecological approach to object pretend play, developed from the ecological perspective, suggests an action- and affordance based perspective to account for pretend object play. Theoretical, as well as empirical reasons, support the view that children in pretense incorporate objects into their play in a resourceful and functionally appropriate way based on the perception of affordances. Therefore, in pretense children are not distorting reality but rather, they are perceiving and acting upon action possibilities. In this paper, we argue for (...) the viability of an ecological theoretical framework to pretend object play which has been traditionally understood as a representational and metarepresentational ability. We discuss the origins and basic assumptions of the ecological approach to pretense. We layout details by presenting a qualitative analysis of a pretend play episode and discuss the results of an experimental study inspired by the ecological assumptions. We discuss pretend object play in the context of ecological work on tool use. We address the relationship between the enactive and the ecological approaches to pretend play, pointing out similarities as well as differences. We conclude that ecological and enactive approaches have shown that it is possible to challenge accepted interpretations and seek explanatory frameworks that could move the field in new directions. (shrink)

The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such contentions involve a failure to understand central themes in Winch's writings and that the (...) issues which occupied him in his Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy and later papers remain central to social studies. The volume offers a careful reading of the text in alliance with Wittgensteinian insights and alongside a focus on the nature and results of social thought and inquiry. It draws parallels with other movements in the social studies, notably ethnomethodology, to demonstrate how Winch's central claim is both more significant and more difficult to transcend than sociologists and philosophers have hitherto imagined. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:189 HUME'S MORAL ONTOLOGY* My concern here is the claim, made in my recent book, that Hume is a moral realist. In general terms I would describe this book as one of several that represent a sustained effort to consider Hume within an eighteenth-century context, an effort to see him not as a timeless figure, or to treat him as a brilliantly successful contemporary of ourselves, but as (...) a brilliant eighteenth-century philosopher responding to eighteenth-century issues with, for all his timelessness, eighteenth-century conceptual tools and 2 from an eighteenth-century perspective. It would be hopelessly naive to suppose that any of us can view Hume without any historical distortion, but it is equally naive to read Hume, as he is often read, without historical sensitivity. Furthermore, such insensitivity closes us off from what is uniquely valuable about Hume, for, instead of seeing his writings as the consequence of his unique efforts to confront and answer the philosophical questions posed to him, the historically insensitive read into him their own questions and their own answers. The past studied as an echo of the present is of little interest (and none of that intrinsic), nor can there be much value in the study of those who saw but through a glass, darkly, the truths now so apparent to us. Our intellectual past is important to us because it is different from our intellectual present, and not because it seconds what we presume already to know. I was entirely serious, then, when I said that both the plausibility, and the very meaning of my claim that Hume is a common-sense moralist or a moral realist depends upon considering this claim — and, consequently, Hume — within a particular philosophical context. It will not do to suppose that moral realism 190 is a term with an eternal, unchanging, and Platonic connotation, and then to reject my suggestion outright because Hume was, as I would certainly agree, virtually without sympathy for anything revealing a tincture of Platonism. Philosophical terms as well as philosophical issues are historical, changing entities; it is those who think or act otherwise who smuggle 4 Platonism into the discussion. Doubtless, however, some of the misunderstanding to which I refer is my own responsibility. I can join Hume in saying "I have found by experience, that some of my expressions have not been so well chosen, as to guard against all 5 mistakes in the readers," and so I shall here offer some clarifications of my view. I. To begin, I wish to bring together in one place evidence of the significant qualifications I put on my claim about Hume's moral realism. Taken together, these remarks show that my position is consistent with the widely held (and generally correct, I would say) view that Hume is in one highly important sense a naturalist, and that I ascribe to him a realism that is neither Platonic, Scholastic, Cartesian, nor Hutchesonian: A. If naturalism is thought to be the view "that the whole of the universe or experience may be accounted for by a method like that of the physical sciences," then Hume must certainly be called a naturalist because of his efforts to extend the "experimental Method of Reasoning into moral Subjects".... Hume is a naturalist in that he sought to produce coherent philosophical explanations without the slightest recourse to supernatural entities or transcendental principles... an obvious example of this kind of naturalism... is his attempt to explain moral values as derived from human nature or from, that is, human beings as constituted and active in the world (DH 15-16). 191 B. By no stretch of the imagination can Hume be supposed to have borrowed this providential aspect of Hutcheson's thought, not even in morals (DH 54; also see p. 93). C I submit that /Hume/ holds that vice and disapprobation are not identical and that moral qualities are not merely sentiments but, rather, the objective correlates of sentiments. /Footnote:/ No rash conclusions should be drawn from this claim about objective correlates. I do not suggest that virtue and vice are objects in the ordinary sense (physical objects), or that they are transcendently existing qualities of... (shrink)

Encultured individuals see the behavioral rules of cultural systems of moral norms as objective. In addition to prescriptive regulation of behavior, moral norms provide templates, scripts, and scenarios regulating the expression of feelings and triggered emotions arising from perceptions of norm violation. These allow regulated defensive responses that may arise as moral idea systems co-opt emotionally associated biological survival instincts.

Supposing that one is already familiar with special relativistic physics, what constitutes the best route via which to arrive at the architecture of the general theory of relativity? Although the later Einstein would stress the significance of mathematical and theoretical principles in answering this question, in this article we follow the lead of the earlier Einstein (circa 1916) and stress instead how one can go a long way to arriving at the general theory via inductive and empirical principles, without invoking (...) presumptions concerning the geometrical structure of the final theory. We focus on the construction of the kinematical structure and the terms describing the coupling of matter to gravity. General covariance, understood and employed as a straightforward extrapolation of empirical considerations, is central to our derivation, together with what we dub the `Methodological Equivalence Principle'. We argue that our approach has a number of virtues, both for one's understanding of the general theory of relativity, but also for pedagogy, since it stresses---to the greatest extent possible (a lesson which we inherit from Bell, [1976])---both the methodological precedence of dynamical considerations to interpretative issues and the theoretical continuity between general relativity and its precursors. We conclude by comparing our approach to other philosophical approaches to general relativity and discussing the significance of empirically motivated methodological principles in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

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'An urgent and extraordinary book. Weaving a philosophical analysis of Heidegger, Agamben and Foucault, Jan draws out the implications of their thought for a radical analysis of the ontological politics of Islam and Pakistan. Whether writing about the 'Ulama and Deoband schools, blasphemy laws, the military, beards, or the Bamiyan Buddhas, Jan provokes and challenges our thinking while unearthing the ground on which Pakistan—and our world—are built.' —Joel Wainwright, Department of Geography, Ohio State University, USA 'In this exceptionally inventive and (...) important book, Jan shows us that the problems besetting political life in Pakistan are part of a more troubling crisis in modern forms of power. Challenging accounts that cordon off "political Islam" from "the West," Jan discloses their fundamental indistinction and thus, through his practice of critical ontology, reorients our understanding of how power and violence are at work in the world.' —Joshua Barkan, Department of Geography, University of Georgia, USA The Metacolonial State presents a novel rethinking of the relationship between Islam and the Political. Key to the text is an original argument regarding the "biopoliticization of Islam" and the imperative need for understanding sovereign power and the state of exception in resolutely ontological terms. Through the formulation of a critical ontology of political violence, The Metacolonial State endeavors to shed new light on the signatures of power undergirding postcolonial life, while situating Pakistan as a paradigmatic site for reflection on the nature of modernity's precarious present. The cross-disciplinary approach of Dr. Jan's work is certain to have broad appeal among geographers, historians, anthropologists, postcolonial theorists, and political scientists, among others. At the same time, his explication of critical ontology – with its radical reading of the interlacement of history, power and the event – promises to add a bold new dimension to social science research on Islamism and biopolitics. (shrink)

In order to understand Hegel's approach to philosophy, we need to ask why, and how, he reacts to the well-known criticism of German Romantics, like Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, against philosophical system building in general, and against Kant's system in particular. Hegel's encyclopedic system is a topical ordering of categorically different ontological realms, corresponding to different conceptual forms of representation and knowledge. All in all it turns into a systematic defense of Fichte's doctrine concerning the primacy of us as actors (...) with respect to any knowledge claim or scientific theory. Hegel's limitations of the principle of causality and of the possibility of using mathematical methods in science show, in fact, how a merely compatibilist solution of Kant's third antinomy can be overcome. (shrink)

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all (...) sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand. (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism – as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (which interestingly is not just a phrase repeated from Hobbes and Locke to Diderot, but is also a medical phrase, used by Harvey, Mandeville and others). That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I (...) shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind” (Essay, I.i.2, in Locke 1975; which Kant gets exactly wrong in his reading of Locke, in the Preface to the A edition of the first Critique). Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader (Wolfe and Salter 2009, Wolfe 2010). Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (Essay, I.i.6). There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism (see Norton 1981 and Gaukroger 2005), but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology (a claim about the senses as the source of knowledge) becomes an ontology – materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality (and/or the mind, in which case it needs, as David Hartley saw and Denis Diderot proclaimed more overtly, an account of the relation between mental processes and the brain). (David Armstrong, for one, denied that there could be an identification between empiricism and materialism on this point: eighteenth-century history of science seems to prove him wrong: see Armstrong 1968 and 1978.) Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century (Locke) to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us (Condillac), to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe (Diderot, giving a materialist cast to Spinozism), and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

My topic is the materialist appropriation of empiricism—as conveyed in the ‘minimal credo’ nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu. That is, canonical empiricists like Locke go out of their way to state that their project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ideas’ is not a scientific project: “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical consideration of the Mind”. Indeed, I have suggested elsewhere, contrary to a prevalent reading of Locke, that the Essay is (...) not the extension to the study of the mind of the methods of natural philosophy; that he is actually not the “underlabourer” of Newton and Boyle he claims politely to be in the Epistle to the Reader. Rather, Locke says quite directly if we pay heed to such passages, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct”. There would be more to say here about what this implies for our understanding of empiricism, but instead I shall focus on a different aspect of this episode: how a non-naturalistic claim which falls under what we now call epistemology becomes an ontology—materialism. That is, how an empiricist claim could shift from being about the sources of knowledge to being about the nature of reality.. Put differently, I want to examine the shift from the logic of ideas in the seventeenth century to an eighteenth-century focus on what kind of ‘world’ the senses give us, to an assertion that there is only one substance in the universe, and that we need an account of the material substrate of mental life. This is neither a ‘scientific empiricism’ nor a linear developmental process from philosophical empiricism to natural science, but something else again: the unpredictable emergence of an ontology on empiricist grounds. (shrink)

This paper confronts a certain modern view of the relation between semantics and ontology with that of the late-medieval nominalist philosophers, William Ockham and John Buridan. The modern view in question is characterized in terms of what is called here “the thesis of onto-semantic parallelism,” which states that the primitive (indefinable) categorematic concepts of our semantics mark out the primary entities in reality. The paper argues that, despite some apparently plausible misinterpretations to the contrary, the late-medieval nominalist program of (...) “ontological reduction” was not driven by considerations that try to “read off” ontology from semantic analysis or those that try to identify semantic primitives in their search for ontological primitives. The medieval authors presented a much more flexible, dynamic view of “Aristotelian naturalism,” which challenges both of the unappealing modern alternatives of “conceptual tribalism” and “conceptual imperialism.”. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to critically assess the ‘three-world theory’ as it is presented—with some slight but decisive differences—by Jürgen Habermas and Karl Popper. This theory presents the philosophy of science with a conceptual and material problem, insofar as it claims that science has no single access to all aspects of the world. Although I will try to demonstrate advantages of Popper’s idea of ‘the third world’ of ideas, the shortcomings of his ontological stance become visible (...) from the pragmatic point of view in Habermas’s theory of communicative acts. With regard to the critique that the three-world theory has met in both its pragmatic and ontological versions, I will take a closer look at John Searle’s naturalistic counter-position. By teasing out some problematic implications in his theory of causation, I aim to show that Searle’s approach is, in fact, much closer to Popper’s than he might think. Finally, while condoning Habermas’s distinction between the natural world and the lifeworld, I will opt for a pragmatically differentiated view of ‘the real’, rather than speaking of different worlds. (shrink)

This article addresses ontological negotiations in the Global South through three case studies of community-based research in Brazil and Ghana. We argue that ontological perspectives of Indigenous and other subjugated communities require an ontological pluralism that recognizes the plurality of both representational tools and ways of being in the world. Locating these two readings of ontological pluralism in the politics of the Global South, the article highlights a wider dynamic from ontological paternalism to ontological diversity to ontological decolonization. We (...) conclude by arguing that this dynamic provides important lessons for reorienting agendas in social ontology through Southern Ontologies. (shrink)

In the age of the `return to the empirical' in which the theoretical disputes of an earlier era seem to have fallen silent, we seek to excavate the intellectual conditions for reviving theoretical debate, for it is upon this recovery that deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of empirical social science depends. We argue against the all too frequent turn to ontology, whereby critical realists have sought an epistemological guarantor of sociological validity. We seek, to the contrary, (...) to crystallize a culturally-based, hermeneutic account of a rational social science. Derived from disputes within the sociology of culture, on the one hand, and the long-standing concerns of interpretive philosophy, on the other, we offer a cultural-sociological approach to epistemology. We view the production of truth in social science as a reading of a meaningful social world, and as a performance of truth-claims that is constrained by evidence, but whose success depends on other contextual factors. We conclude that the rationality of social science can be achieved only by forgoing ontology. Theories are abstractions of investigators' meanings that allow the interpretation of social meanings in turn, whether those are actions, relations, or structures. Successful explanations are those that intertwine these meaning structures of investigators and actors in an effective way. (shrink)

Wittgenstein wrote: “No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought-processes from brain processes.” In general, he rejects what he calls “psycho-physical parallelism.” In Sect. 1, I explain Wittgenstein’s position on this topic and how his followers defend it. In Sect. 2, I argue against Wittgenstein, contending that there is “thought” in a wider sense and that (...) it can be “manifested” without expression. Thought does not need to be ordinarily expressed or even expressible, and it can be read off from the brain, provided one has sufficient technology, data, and understanding of the subject’s interaction with the environment. In Sect. 3, I offer results from brain-science in support of my claims. (shrink)

Numerous scholarly works focus solely on scientific metaphysics or biological practice, but few attempt to bridge the two subjects. This volume, the latest in the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science series, explores what a scientific metaphysics grounded in biological practices could look like and how it might impact the way we investigate the world around us. From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics examines how to reconcile the methods of biological practice with the methods of metaphysical cosmology, (...) notably regarding the origins of life. The contributors take up a wide range of traditional metaphysics and philosophy of science topics, including natural kinds, medicine, ecology, genetics, scientific pluralism, reductionism, operationalism, mechanisms, the nature of information, and more. Many of the chapters represent the first philosophical treatments of significant biological practices. From causality and complexity to niche constructions and inference, the contributors review and discuss long-held objections to metaphysics by natural scientists. They illuminate how, in order to learn about the world as it truly is, we must look not only at what scientists say but also what they do: for ontology cannot be read directly from scientific claims. (shrink)

Philosophers and non-philosophers have been attracted to the idea that the world incorporates levels of being: higher-level items – ordinary objects, artifacts, human beings – depend on, but are not in any sense reducible to, items at lower levels. I argue that the motivation for levels stems from an implicit acceptance of a Picture Theory of language according to which we can ‘read off’ features of the world from ways we describe the world. Abandonment of the Picture Theory (...) opens the way to a ‘no levels’ conception of reality, a conception that honors anti-reductionist sentiments and preserves the status of the special sciences without the ontological baggage. (shrink)

“Over a hundred years ago Thorstein Veblen expressed the view that the ontological or ‘metaphysical’ presuppositions of economics needed to be more realistic, a view that was a necessary part of his support for evolutionary thinking. When he was writing, though, evolutionary theorising in economics had been introduced in a rather incoherent manner resulting in an ontological mishmash - of a sort that led Veblen to coin the label neoclassical for those involved. As it happened evolutionary thinking never really took (...) off in a coherent way in economics, and social ontological reasoning itself became somewhat marginalised. As I write, however, there are once more groups of scholars including economists developing systematic projects in social ontology. Now, however, the branch of non-social science attracting the most attention is quantum mechanics. An issue of interest that is explored here is whether the growing concern of economists with quantum insights will finally allow the specific ontological conception supported by Veblen to become established, facilitating, amongst other things, a turn to a coherent form of evolutionary thinking, or whether, as argued by some, it is more likely to lead to support for the ontological mix-up sustained by those Veblen labelled neoclassical.”. (shrink)