This paper analyses the place of natural history within Bacon's divisions of the sciences in The Advancement of Learning and the later De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum. It is shown that at various points in Bacon's divisions, natural history converges or overlaps with natural philosophy, and that, for Bacon, natural history and natural philosophy are not discrete disciplines. Furthermore, it is argued that Bacon's distinction between operative and speculative natural philosophy and the place of natural history within this distinction, are (...) discontinuous with the later distinction between experimental and speculative philosophy that emerged in the methodology of the Fellows of the early Royal Society. (shrink)

John Doris has recently argued that since we do not possess character traits as traditionally conceived, virtue ethics is rooted in a false empirical presupposition. Gopal Sreenivasan has claimed, in a paper in Mind, that Doris has not provided suitable evidence for his empirical claim. But the experiment Sreenivasan focuses on is not one that Doris employs, and neither is it relevantly similar in structure. The confusion arises because both authors use the phrase ‘cross-situational consistency’ to describe the aspect of (...) character traits that they are concerned with, but neither defines this phrase, and it is ambiguous: Doris uses it in one sense, Sreenivasan in another. Partly for this reason, the objections Sreenivasan raises fail to block the argument Doris provides. In particular, the most reliable data Doris employs, Milgram’s famous study of authority, is entirely immune to Sreenivasan’s objections. Sreenivasan has not shown, therefore, that Doris provides unsuitable evidence for his claim. (shrink)

This paper addresses a central interpretive problem in understanding Pierre Duhem's philosophy of science. The problem arises because there is textual support for both realist and antirealist readings of his work. I argue that his realist and antirealist claims are different. For Duhem, scientific reasoning leads straight to antirealism. But intuition (reasons of the heart) motivates, without justifying, a kind of realism. I develop this idea to suggest a motivational realist interpretation of Duhem's philosophy.

Locke is often cited as a precursor to contemporary natural kind realism. However, careful attention to Locke’s arguments show that he was unequivocally a conventionalist about natural kinds. To the extent that contemporary natural kind realists see themselves as following Locke, they misunderstand what he was trying to do. Locke argues that natural kinds require either dubious metaphysical commitments (e.g., to substantial forms or universals), or a question-begging version of essentialism. Contemporary natural kind realists face a similar dilemma, and should (...) not appeal to Locke in their defense. (shrink)

It is often held that identity properties like the property of being identical to Paris are intrinsic. It is also often held that, while some logically uninstantiable properties are intrinsic, some logically uninstantiable properties are non-intrinsic. The combination of these views, however, raises a problem, since virtually every existing account of intrinsicality fails to analyse a notion of intrinsicality on which both these views are true. In this paper, I argue that, given the orthodox theory of counterlogicals, there is no (...) notion of intrinsicality on which both these views are true. If this argument is sucessful, then, at least given orthodoxy about counterlogicals, we face no challenge in analysing a notion of intrinsicality on which both these views are true, since there is no such notion. In addition, if we are also convinced that there is a notion of intrinsicality on which one of these views is true and a notion of intrinsicality on which the other of these views is true, we should hold that there is more than one notion of intrinsicality. (shrink)

Since the early 80s, metonymy has progressively gained central stage in linguistic investigations. The advent of cognitive linguistics marked a new turn in the study of this trope conceived, not as a deviation from semantic conventions (contra classical rhetorical theories), but as a phenomenon rooted in non-language-specific mechanisms of conceptualization and structuring of the world. Focusing on the particular case of whole-for-part (WP) metonymy, the general stand of this presentation will be to argue for the need to re-inject properly semantic (...) (descriptive and formal) considerations in the study of metonymy. It will be shown that semantic typologies of meronymic relations, as well as recent results in the semantics of partial predicates and colour predicates, can be jointly exploited to attain a better understanding of the mechanism of WP-metonymy. The resulting view will in particular connect such metonymies to mechanisms of reference and property attribution to functional parts for classificatory purposes. (shrink)

The concept of a function is central both to biology and to technology. But there is an intricate debate how functions as well as related entities like dispositions and roles are to be represented in top level ontologies and how they are to be related. We review important philosophical accounts and ontological models for functions and roles and discuss three models for the relation of functions and dispositions. We conclude that mainly because of the need to account for malfunctioning, functions (...) should not be treated as a subtype of dispositions, but as their sibling category. (shrink)

Need the moral be repeated? There exist two distinct circuits, each with its own final market. The equilibrium of the economic process is conditioned by the balance of the two circuits: each must be allowed the possibility of continuity, of basic outlay yielding an equal basic income and surplus outlay yieldingan equal surplus income, of basic and surplus income yielding equal basic and surplus expenditure, and of these grounding equivalent basic and surplus outlay. But what cannot be tolerated, much less (...) sustained, is for one circuit to be drained by the other. That is the essence of dynamic disequilibrium. (shrink)

This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "the human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological ...

It has not been sufficiently considered in philosophical discussions of ceteris paribus (CP) laws that distinct kinds of CP-laws exist in science with rather different meanings. I distinguish between (1.) comparative CP-laws and (2.) exclusive CP-laws. There exist also mixed CP-laws, which contain a comparative and an exclusive CP-clause. Exclusive CP-laws may be either (2.1) definite, (2.2) indefinite or (2.3) normic. While CP-laws of kind (2.1) and (2.2) exhibit deductivistic behaviour, CP-laws of kind (2.3) require a probabilistic or non-monotonic reconstruction. (...) CP-laws of kind (1) may be both deductivistic or probabilistic. All these kinds of CP-laws have empirical content by which they are testable, except CP-laws of kind (2.2) which are almost vacuous. Typically, CP-laws of kind (1) express invariant correlations, CP-laws of kind (2.1) express closed system laws of physical sciences, and CP-laws of kind (2.3) express normic laws of non-physical sciences based on evolution-theoretic stability properties. (shrink)

Three kinds of concepts can be distinguished in Plato and Aristotle, empirical genera and species, “transcendental” concepts such as being and unity, and polarized “meanings of being” such as power and actuality. Both Kant and Hegel break with the traditional dominance of polarized meanings of being, but they do so in different ways which are at work as competing trends inside both Continental and analytic philosophy today.

The paper aims to discuss the results of testing a neural network which classifies the vowels of the vocalic system with the [ATR] (Advanced Tongue Root) contrast based on the data of Akebu (Kwa family). The acoustic nature of the [ATR] feature is yet understudied. The only reliable acoustic correlate of [ATR] is the magnitude of the first formant (F1) which can be also modulated by tongue height, resulting in significant overlap between high [-ATR] vowels and mid [+ATR] vowels. Other (...) acoustic metrics which had been associated with the [ATR], such as F1 bandwidth (B1), relative intensity of F1 to F2 (A1-A2), etc., are typically inconsistent across vowel types and speakers. The values of four metrics – F1, F2, A1-A2, B1 – were used for training and testing the neural network. We tested four versions of the model differing in the presence of the fifth variable encoding the speaker and the number of hidden layers. The models which included the variable encoding the speaker achieved slightly higher accuracy, whereas the precision and recall metrics of the three-layer model were generally higher than those with two hidden layers. (shrink)

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe’s biological races in the 1820s—1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community’s shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were (...) structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core— periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe’s complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity. (shrink)

A theory is stable up to Δ if any Δ-type over a model has a few extensions up to complete types. We prove that a theory has no the independence property iff it is stable up to some Δ, where each equation image has no the independence property.