"This volume is a scholarly collection of massive biographical detail, much of which is being revealed for the first time." —Isis A selection of Fisch's most important articles on these topics is presented here in a convenient format, including revisions and updating and a complete bibliography of Fisch's published writings.

For many, the two key thinkers about science in the twentieth century are Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, and one of the key questions in contemplating science is how to make sense of theory change. In Creatively Undecided, philosopher Menachem Fisch defends a new way to make sense of the rationality of scientific revolutions. He argues, loosely following Kuhn, for a strong notion of the framework dependency of all scientific practice, while at the same time he shows how such (...) frameworks can be deemed the possible outcomes of keen rational deliberation along Popperian lines. Fisch's innovation is to call attention to the importance of ambiguity and indecision in scientific change and advancement. Specifically, he backs the problem up, looking not at how we might communicate rationally across an already existing divide but at the rational incentive to create an alternative framework in the first place. Creatively Undecided will be essential reading for philosophers of science, and its vivid case study in Victorian mathematics will draw in historians. (shrink)

This article extends property-owning democracy to the digital realm and introduces “data-owning democracy,” a new political economic regime characterized by the wide distribution of data as capital among citizens. Drawing on republican theory and acknowledging data's unique role in the digital economy, it proposes a two-tier model that combines different modes of data ownership and corresponding rights. The first layer of “data-owning democracy” is characterized by a digital public infrastructure that enables citizens to collectively generate data and have a say (...) in how their citizen data are used. In the second layer, individuals automatically receive machine-readable copies of their data whenever they are generated—a slightly more advanced form of the European Union's existing right to data portability (Art. 20). With its focus on empowerment, data-owning democracy is designed to be complementary to existing data protection regulations. It also illustrates how political theory more broadly, and republican theory specifically, can be instructive for specifying the normative components of a new political economy dealing with questions of empowerment and digital rights. (shrink)

The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate William Whewell's notion of a "consilience of inductions." In section I Whewellian consilience is defined and shown to differ considerably from what latter-day writers talk about when they use the term. In section II a primary analysis of consilience is shown to yield two types of consilient processes, one in which one of the lower-level laws undergoes a conceptual change (the case aptly discussed in Butts [1977]), and one in which the explanatory theory (...) undergoes conceptual "stretching." In section III both consilient cases are compared to the non-consilient case in reference to L. J. Cohen's method of relevant variables. In section IV we examine the test procedures of the theory in all three cases, and it is shown that in the event of genuine consilience (consilience of the second type) a theory acquires extraordinarily high support. In the final section something is said of the short-comings of standard Bayesian confirmation theories that are highlighted by Whewellian consilience. (shrink)

__The View from Within_ _examines the character of reason and the ability of an individual to effectively distance himself from the normative framework in which he functions in order to be self-critical and innovative. To accomplish this task, Menachem Fisch and Yitzhak Benbaji critically employ or reject the recent writings of Brandom, Friedman, Frankfurt, Walzer, Davidson, Williams, Habermas, Rorty, and McDowell to offer a fundamental analysis of the character of reason and the problem of relativism. This ambitious book forcefully (...) raises the problem of rational normative change and makes the unique and insightful claim that although we cannot be _convinced _by normative criticism to modify or replace our norms, we can be rationally _motivated_ to do so by the effect of exposure to trusted critics. Its unprecedented analysis, with its solution to the problem of normative self-criticism that has baffled philosophers for the past sixty years, will be welcomed by both students and scholars of philosophy. “__The View from Within_ _is a thorough evaluation of the arguments made by contemporary philosophers about the normative character of reason and the derivative problem of relativism. Fisch and Benbaji have admirably compared and contrasted competing positions, and with a balanced critique, they have made a sustained effort to ‘save’ rationality and provide new guideposts for its philosophical evaluation. A timely and important contribution.” —_Alfred I. Tauber, Boston University_. (shrink)

“Arisbe,” the Peirce home near Milford, Pennsylvania, belongs to the National Park Service, and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area is responsible for its care. In 1979 a geodetic triangulation station was installed in the front yard and named the “C. S. Peirce Station.” This was intended, at least in part, as a recognition of the fact that Peirce's scientific career was in the service of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and that the first of his more than thirty (...) years in its service was spent with triangulating parties along the coasts of Maine and of the Gulf states. It offers a suggestive metaphor for the present occasion. If the questions, methods, answers and reasons of another thinker, or of a whole movement of thought, whether earlier or later than Peirce, are illuminated by locating them, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively, in relation to those of the C. S. Peirce station, we may count that as part of the range of Peirce's relevance. In the case of an earlier thinker or movement, the relevance does not depend on Peirce's awareness or acknowledgment; in the case of a later thinker or movement, it does not depend on awareness or acknowledgment by that thinker or by one or more representatives of that movement. If the thinker is oneself, the triangulating will of course require a certain detachment. At least within limits, and perhaps even without limit, degrees of nearness or remoteness, likeness or difference, do not as such constitute degrees of relevance. And even if our interest is primarily in philosophical relevance, mathematical or scientific relevance may entail philosophical, and so be counted. (shrink)

William Whewell was a giant of Victorian intellectual culture. His influence, whether recognized or forgotten, is palpable in areas as diverse as moral philosophy, mineralogy, architecture, the politics of education, physics, engineering, and theology. Recent studies of the place of the sciences in nineteenth-century Britain have repeatedly indicated the significance of Whewell's sweeping and critical proposals for a reformed account of scientific knowledge and moral values. However, until now there has been no detailed study of the context and impact of (...) his project. This collection of essays by recognized authorities in the fields of history, history of science, and philosophy thus represents the first attempt to do justice to a magisterial nineteenth-century intellectual. More generally, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of Victorian intellectual life and its aftermath. (shrink)

This article introduces the confrontational theology of the rabbinic literature of late antiquity by means of a well-known, yet ill-understood legend. It goes on to argue that Talmudic confrontationalism comes coupled with an insistent dialogism that, unlike any other major human undertaking, displays a profound awareness of the indispensable role of external normative critique in the process of changing one’s mind.

A study of the making of George Peacock's highly influential, yet disturbingly split, 1830 account of algebra as an entanglement of two separate undertakings: arithmetical and symbolical or formal.

A survey of the fields in which Peirce’s relevance is now recognized may best begin with that in which such recognition is most nearly universal. The commonest English form of the name of that field is now semiotics. As a field of systematic study, it is still so young that there are as yet few if any university departments bearing its name; but there are several interdisciplinary programs and research centers, and several national societies and journals; and there is an (...) International Association for Semiotic Studies, which was founded at Paris in 1969; which publishes the most voluminous journal in the field, Semiotica; and which held its first congress at Milan in 1974 and its second at Vienna in 1979. At the latter there were three “working sessions” devoted to “Investigations into Peirce’s Theory of Signs.”. (shrink)

The history of pragmatism is still to be written. At many points throughout we lack even the prerequisite of history, a firm chronology. As a specimen, I offer a chronology for a short span of the history of Peirce’s pragmaticism. I begin with 1865, when Peirce is twenty-five, a scientist in the employ of the United States Coast Survey, married, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when he has been for perhaps nine years a student of Kant and is already well (...) along in those “successive steps” by which, from being a “pure Kantist,” he is being “forced … into Pragmaticism.” The method I follow is to base the chronology at each point on dated documentary evidence of the year, month, or day in question. I do, however, make subsidiary use, but only within square brackets, of documents of later date, or without date. My own inferences, conjectures and comments are also bracketed. (shrink)

Robert Brandom's "The Pragmatist Enlightenment" describes the advent of American pragmatism as signaling a sea-change in our understanding of human reason away from the top-down Euclidian models of reasoning, warrant and knowledge inspired by the physical sciences, toward the far more bottom-up, narrative, inherently fallible and dialogical forms of reasoning of the life and human sciences. It is against this backdrop that Talmudic Judaism emerges not only as an early anticipation of the pragmatist enlightenment, but as going a substantial and (...) radical step beyond it, that in the context of religious commitment and reasoning, is unprecedented. (shrink)

The paper describes a form a non-Socratic dialogue which aims at exposing oneself to the normative critique of interlocutors with different commitments. It further argues that such exposure is the only way in which one can achieve critical distance from one's own commitments. It goes on to explore the epistemic and political virtues of this form of dialogue.

Babbage wrote two relatively detailed, yet significantly incongruous, autobiographical accounts of his pre-Cambridge and Cambridge days. He published one in 1864 and in it advertised the existence of the other, which he carefully retained in manuscript form. The aim of this paper is to chart in some detail for the first time the discrepancies between the two accounts, to compare and assess their relative credibility, and to explain their author's possible reasons for knowingly fabricating the less credible of the two.

The problems divulged, analyzed and allegedly solved in Science, Order & Creativity are not scientific problems. They attest to a fundamental failure of science but not to scientific failure per se. Bohm and Peat's meta-scientific undertaking cannot afford, therefore, to remain negative. However, neither science itself nor current professional philosophy are capable of the radical positive rethinking required, in their view, in order to restore and ensure scientific creativity.

Essay review of Y. Gingras, Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue, Polity Press, 2017.

0. Rational Rabbis aspires to make two main points, one philosophical and contemporary, the other interpretative and historical. The book’s philosophical undertaking, presented in Part I, is to develop a central insight of Karl Popper’s into a more fuller theory of rational endeavor. The book’s interpretative and main undertaking, presented in Part II, is to argue (a) that the talmudic literature bears clear witness to a tannaitic view of humanly possible intellectual achievement intriguingly akin to the theory of rationality proposed (...) in Part I, and (b) that despite appearances to the contrary, it is a voice centrally responsible for the Bavli’s halakhic discourse and project. The TR session at AAR 2002 focused on this second last claim by means of a close reading of the ‘meitivi’ sugya presented in Bavli, Berakhot 19b-20a. A detailed reading of the sugya can now be accessed at: http://jtr.lib.virginia.edu/volume4/number2/TR04_02_a01.html What follows briefly summarizes that reading and outlines its broader philosophical and hermeneutical settings. (shrink)