This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Language matters to epistemology for two separate reasons (although they are no doubt connected) -/- My interest in testimony derives from Gareth Evans, as does my conviction that it cannot be accommodated by the sort of account of knowledge which I attack in this paper. I believe I also owe to him my interest in the sorts of case I discuss in §4 below, where knowledge is retained under the risk that what would have been knowledge if the relevant fact (...) had still obtained is not knowledge because the fact no longer obtains. I have benefited from comments by Robert Brandom and Jonathan Dancy. (shrink)

The Human Psyche is an in-depth exploration of dualist-interactionism, a concept Sir John Eccles developed with Sir Karl Popper in the context of a wide...

This chapter defends a pluralistic view of science: the various projects of enquiry that fall under the general rubric of science share neither a methodology nor a subject matter. Ontologically, it is argued that sciences need have nothing in common beyond an antipathy to the supernatural. Epistemically one central virtue is defended, empiricism, meaning just that scientific knowledge must ultimately be answerable to experience. Prima facie science is as diverse as the world it studies; and rejection of this prima facie (...) diversity in favour of a spurious aspiration to unity is grounded in a priori assumption not experience. Disunity, however, does not mean disconnectedness, and the connections between different areas of knowledge are an important theme in the book. (shrink)

In his recent book Against Liberalism, philosopher John Kekes argued that liberalism as a political system is doomed to failure by its internal inconsistencies. In this companion volume, he makes a compelling case for conservatism as the best alternative. His is the first systematic description and defense of the basic assumptions underlying conservative thought. Conservatism, Kekes maintains, is concerned with the political arrangements that enable members of a society to live good lives. These political arrangements are based on skepticism (...) about ideologies, pluralism about values, traditionalism about institutions, and pessimism about human perfectibility. The political morality of conservatism requires the protection of universal conditions of all good lives, social conditions that vary with societies, and individual conditions that reflect differences in character and circumstance. Good lives, according to Kekes, depend equally on pursuing possibilities that these conditions establish and on setting limits to their violations. Attempts to make political arrangements reflect these basic tenets of conservatism are unavoidably imperfect. Kekes concludes, however, that they represent a better hope for the future than any other possibility. (shrink)

The notion of Simulative Reasoning in the study of propositional attitudes within Artificial Intelligence (AI) is strongly related to the Simulation Theory of mental ascription in Philosophy. Roughly speaking, when an AI system engages in Simulative Reasoning about a target agent, it reasons with that agent’s beliefs as temporary hypotheses of its own, thereby coming to conclusions about what the agent might conclude or might have concluded. The contrast is with non-simulative meta-reasoning, where the AI system reasons within a detailed (...) theory about the agent’s (conjectured) reasoning acts. The motive within AI for preferring Simulative Reasoning is that it is more convenient and efficient, because of a simplification of the representations and reasoning processes. The chapter discusses this advantage in detail. It also sketches the use of Simulative Reasoning in an AI natural language processing system, ATT-Meta, that is currently being implemented. This system is directed at the understanding of propositional attitude reports. In ATT-Meta, Simulative Reasoning is yoked to a somewhat independent set of ideas about how attitude reports should be treated. Central here are the claims that (a) speakers often employ commonsense (and largely metaphorical) models of mind in describing agents’ attitudes, (b) the listener accordingly needs often to reason within the terms of such models, rather than on the basis of any objectively justifiable characterization of the mind, and (c) the commonsense models filter the suggestions that Simulative Reasoning comes up with concerning target agents’ reasoning conclusions. There is a yet tighter connection between the commonsense models and the Simulative Reasoning. It turns out that Simulative Reasoning can be rationally reconstructed in terms of a more general type of reasoning about the possibly-counterfactual “world” that the target agent believes in, together with an assumption that that agent has a faithful representation of the world. In the ATT-Meta approach, the reasoner adopts that assumption when it views the target agent through a particular commonsense model (called IDEAS-AS-MODELS). (shrink)

This paper criticizes the traditional philosophical account of the quantization of gauge theories and offers an alternative. On the received view, gauge theories resist quantization because they feature distinct mathematical representatives of the same physical state of affairs. This resistance is overcome by a sequence of ad hoc modifications, justified in part by reference to semiclassical electrodynamics. Among other things, these modifications introduce "ghosts": particles with unphysical properties which do not appear in asymptotic states and which are said to be (...) purely a notational convenience. I argue that this sequence of modifications is unjustified and inadequate, making it a poor basis for the interpretation of ghosts. I then argue that gauge theories can be quantized by the same method as any other theory. On this account, ghosts are not purely notation: they are coordinates on the classical configuration space of the theory—specifically, on its gauge structure. This interpretation does not fall prey to the standard philosophical arguments against the significance of ghosts, due to Weingard. Weingard’s argumentative strategy, properly applied, in fact tells in favor of ghosts’ physical significance. (shrink)

Educational Research is commonly regarded as a rational pursuit aimed at the production of objective knowledge. Researchers are expected to avoid value bias by detaching themselves from the normative conceptions of education that shape practice in schools and classrooms, and by casting themselves in the role of the impartial spectator. It is assumed that, as a rational pursuit, educational research is not directly concerned with changing practice but simply with discovering facts about it.This paper claims that it is possible to (...) construct a view of educational research as a form of rational and disciplined inquiry that does not depend on any underpinning spectator theory of knowledge. Nor, the paper claims, does it imply any underpinning foundational principles of rational action and choice. Rather it implies a form of disciplined conversation in which reasons for action are scrutinised, critiqued and modified without resort to foundational principles of rationality. Drawing particularly on the work of John Dewey, Richard Rorty and Amartya Sen, the paper casts educational research as a practical science—a form of action research—that is underpinned by a democratic conception of rationality. In doing so, it contrasts educational research, shaped by a pragmatic theory of knowledge, with research on education that is shaped by a spectator theory. (shrink)

This Element is an exposition of second- and higher-order logic and type theory. It begins with a presentation of the syntax and semantics of classical second-order logic, pointing up the contrasts with first-order logic. This leads to a discussion of higher-order logic based on the concept of a type. The second Section contains an account of the origins and nature of type theory, and its relationship to set theory. Section 3 introduces Local Set Theory, an important form of type theory (...) based on intuitionistic logic. In Section 4 number of contemporary forms of type theory are described, all of which are based on the so-called 'doctrine of propositions as types'. We conclude with an Appendix in which the semantics for Local Set Theory - based on category theory - is outlined. (shrink)

Gaddis primarily focuses on US dilemmas over the relationship between order and justice throughout the twentieth century. He argues that from the time of Theodore Roosevelt to that of Richard M. Nixon, a concern for order had superseded a concern for justice. After that time, and especially in the post‐Cold War era, these two concepts were finally to be brought together in ways that could be said to have been destabilizing world order. Nevertheless, once entwined, it has been difficult for (...) the US to disentangle the promotion of order from justice even during its post‐September 11th struggle against terrorism. In order for the US to be successful in the promotion of its order and justice agenda, the author concludes that US hegemony needs to be coupled with legitimacy, consent, and a modesty of aims. (shrink)

The objection that Einstein's principle of general covariance is not a relativity principle and has no physical content is reviewed. The principal escapes offered for Einstein's viewpoint are evaluated.

John Wilson; The Teaching Profession: a case of self-mutilation, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 245–250, https://doi.

This article contains John Dewey's remarks given at the funeral of G.H. Mead in Chicago in 1931.

At a previous conference (CONTEXT’99), the author described the ATT-Meta context-based AI system for (a) reasoning uncertainly about agents’ beliefs and (b) performing some of the uncertain reasoning needed for the understanding of metaphorical language. ATT-Meta’s handling of uncertainty is qualitative, and includes provisions for adjudicating conflicts between different lines of reasoning. But most of the detail on conflict-handling given in the earlier paper concerned conflicts arising for the special requirements of (a). Furthermore, there have been major recent changes in (...) the conflict-handling approach. The present paper provides a detailed account of major parts of the current approach, stressing how it operates in metaphorical reasoning. In concentrating on uncertainty-handling, this paper does not seek to repeat the justifications given elsewhere for ATT-Meta’s approach to metaphor. (shrink)

Much philosophy of science is methodology of science. How should one go about doing and evaluating it? The question is one of the methodology of methodology, i.e. of metamethodology. There is a vague thesis common to Descartes and more recent philosophers such as Quine and Lakatos: that what is good methodology, good evidence, good reason for accepting, rejecting or revising beliefs in mathematics and in the sciences properly so called, does not differ in significant kind from what is good methodology, (...) evidence or reason elsewhere, even in epistemology and ethics; and further, that mathematics and the natural sciences provide good paradigms for methodology generally. Following von Hayek,1 I call this form of epistemological and methodological monism: Scientism. (shrink)