Although Burke, Bentham, Hegel and Marx do not often agree, all criticized certain ethical theories, in particular theories of rights, for being too abstract. The complaint is still popular. It was common in Existentialist and in Wittgensteinian writing that stressed the importance of cases and examples rather than principles for the moral life; it has been prominent in recent Hegelian and Aristotelian flavoured writing, which stresses the importance of the virtues; it is reiterated in discussions that stress the distinctiveness and (...) particularity of moral vicissitudes and query the importance of ethical theory. Recent critics of abstraction are opposed not only to theories of rights, and the Kantian notions with which these are linked, but also to consequentialist ethical theories. The two ethical theories that are most influential in the English-speaking world now both stand accused of being too abstract. (shrink)

It is proposed that we use the term “approximation” for inexact description of a target system and “idealization” for another system whose properties also provide an inexact description of the target system. Since systems generated by a limiting process can often have quite unexpected, even inconsistent properties, familiar limit systems used in statistical physics can fail to provide idealizations, but are merely approximations. A dominance argument suggests that the limiting idealizations of statistical physics should be demoted to approximations.

Contemporary public reason liberalism holds that coercion must be publicly justified to an idealized constituency. Coercion must be justified to all qualified points of view, not the points of view held by actual persons. Critics, in particular Nicholas Wolterstorff and David Enoch, have complained that idealization, by idealizing away what actual people accept, risks authoritarianism and disrespect by forcing people to comply with laws they in fact reject. I argue that idealization can withstand this criticism if it satisfies (...) two conditions. First, the standards of idealization, such as the norms of rationality and information, must be grounded in the present commitments of the large majority of members of the public. Second, the standards of idealization must be moderate; that is, they cannot be used to attribute reasons to citizens that stray too far from their actual commitments. (shrink)

The principal task of the book series Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities is to promote those developments in philosophy that respect the tradition of great philosophical ideas, on the one hand, and the manner of philosophical thinking introduced by analytical philosophy, on the other. The aim is to contribute to practicing philosophy as deep as Marxism and as caring about justification as positivism.

Robert Batterman and others have argued that certain idealizing explanations have an asymptotic form: they account for a state of affairs or behavior by showing that it emerges “in the limit”. Asymptotic idealizations are interesting in many ways, but is there anything special about them as idealizations? To understand their role in science, must we augment our philosophical theories of idealization? This paper uses simple examples of asymptotic idealization in population genetics to argue for an affirmative answer and (...) proposes a general schema for asymptotic idealization, drawing on insights from Batterman’s treatment and from John Norton’s subsequent critique. (shrink)

This paper aims (a) to provide characterizations of realism and instrumentalism that are philosophically interesting and applicable to economics; and (b) to defend instrumentalism against realism as a methodological stance in economics. Starting point is the observation that ‘all models are false’, which, or so I argue, is difficult to square with the realist's aim of truth, even if the latter is understood as ‘partial’ or ‘approximate’. The three cheers in favour of instrumentalism are: (1) Once we have usefulness, truth (...) is redundant. (2) There is something disturbing about causal structure. (3) It's better to do what one can than to chase rainbows. (shrink)

This paper examines the dispute between Burge and McDowell over methodology in the philosophy of perception. Burge (2005, 2011) has argued that the disjunctivism posited by naive perceptual realists is incompatible with the results of current perceptual science, while McDowell (2010, 2013) defends his disjunctivism by claiming an autonomous field of enquiry for perceptual epistemology, one that does not employ the classificatory schemes of the science. Here it is argued that the crucial point at issue in the dispute is Burge’s (...) acceptance, and McDowell’s rejection, of the ‘Cartesian idealization’ of mind as a self-contained system. Burge’s case against disjunctivism rests on the assumption of a clearly demarcated boundary between mind and world, a picture of the mind that McDowell’s philosophy reacts against. This boundary is required for scientific, causal explanations of perceptual processing because it is a simplifying assumption that helps present scientists with a clearly demarcated object of investigation. Concurring with McDowell, I conclude that philosophers need not carve up their objects of investigation in the same way. (shrink)

The Galilean explanatory style is characterized by the search for the underlying structure of phenomena, the positing of "deep" explanatory principles, and a view of the relation between theory and data, on which the search for "crucial data" is of primary importance. In this paper, I trace the dynamics of adopting the Galilean style, focusing on the science of episodic memory. I argue that memory systems, such as episodic and semantic memory, were posited as underlying competences producing the observable phenomena (...) of memory. Considered in idealized isolation from other systems, episodic memory was taken to underlay the ability of individuals to remember events from their personal past. Yet, in reality, memory systems regularly interact, standing in many-to-many relations to actual memory tasks and experiences. Upon this backdrop, I explore a puzzle about the increasing prominence of the notion of autonoetic consciousness in Tulving's theory of episodic memory. I argue that, contrary to widespread belief, the prominence is not best explained by the purported essential link between autonoetic consciousness and episodic memory. Rather, it is explained by the fact that autonoetic consciousness, hypothesized to uniquely accompany episodic retrieval, was considered a source of crucial data, predictable only from theories positing a functionally distinct episodic memory system. However, with the emergence of a new generation of theories, positing wider memory systems for remembering and imagination, the question of the relation between episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness has been reopened. This creates a pressing need for de-idealization, triggering a new search for crucial data. (shrink)

Subjectivism about well-being holds that an object contributes to one's well-being to the extent that one has a pro-attitude toward this object under certain conditions. Most subjectivists have contended that these conditions should be ideal. One reason in favor of this idea is that when people adapt their pro-attitudes to situations of oppression, the levels of well-being they may attain is diminished. Nevertheless, I first argue that appealing to idealized conditions of autonomy or any other condition to erase or replace (...) adaptive pro-attitudes is mistaken. Second, I show that the most natural version of subjectivism that does not appeal to any such idealizing condition can explain why the well-being of people having adaptive pro-attitudes should not be restricted to the fulfillment of these pro-attitudes. In sum, the existence of adaptive preferences does not militate in favor of the introduction of conditions of idealization but against it. (shrink)

Mauricio Suárez and Agnes Bolinska apply the tools of communication theory to scientific modeling in order to characterize the informational content of a scientific model. They argue that when represented as a communication channel, a model source conveys information about its target, and that such representations are therefore appropriate whenever modeling is employed for informational gain. They then extract two consequences. First, the introduction of idealizations is akin in informational terms to the introduction of noise in a signal; for in (...) an idealization we introduce ‘extraneous’ elements into the model that have no correlate in the target. Second, abstraction in a model is informationally equivalent to equivocation in the signal; for in an abstraction we “neglect” in the model certain features that obtain in the target. They conclude that it becomes possible in principle to quantify idealization and abstraction in informative models, although precise absolute quantification will be difficult to achieve in practice. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to emphasize a number of important points that will provide a better understanding of the history of philosophical thought concerning scientific knowledge. The main points made are: (a) that the principal way of viewing abstraction which has dominated the history of thought and epistemology up to the present is influenced by the original Aristotelian position; (b) that with the birth of modern science a new way of conceiving abstraction came into being which is better (...) characterized by the term idealization, the name that was later, in fact, to be used by scientists to describe their scientific activity; (c) that, however, on account of the influence of empirical and inductive philosophy, scientists have often not had sufficient methodological awareness of this new way of viewing abstraction; (d) that this new concept of abstraction has frequently been expressed in the framework of philosophies that lie outside the mainstream of contemporary epistemology or even exhibit marked anti-scientific tendencies; (e) that the theme of idealization has been taken up again in the last few decades and a great contribution in this direction has been made by the so-called Pozna school of methodology. (shrink)

In 1804, when asked by the aspiring writer Clemens Brentano why she had chosen to publish her work, Karoline von Günderrode wrote that she longed “mein Leben in einer bleibenden Form auszusprechen, in einer Gestalt, die würdig sei, zu den Vortreflichsten hinzutreten, sie zu grüssen und Gemeinschaft mit ihnen zu haben.” In light of this kind of statement, it is perhaps not surprising if, despite some exceptions, much of the still relatively scant literature on Günderrode reads her works largely in (...) terms of how they articulate and manifest Günderrode’s desires, frustrations, and character, for the most part ignoring their imaginary, creative, and intellectual aspects. This interpretation of the author’s works as biography is, in Günderrode’s case, often accompanied by an interpretation of her biography, particularly her suicide, as literary work. This paper is not the first to question the conflation of Günderrode’s life, death, and writing, but it is one of only a handful that aim to address the autopoietic element of Günderrode’s work in a way that does not reduce her writings to biographical and psychological expressions, or Günderrode herself to an image – or a legend – encapsulated by her writings and her relationship to them. This paper argues that Günderrode’s own position on what the self is has been largely neglected as a result of this conflation, and that taking this position into account changes how we understand Günderrode’s articulations of self in her writings. Thus this paper has two goals: to address difficulties in articulating and even constituting oneself sincerely when one’s efforts are unrecognized, belittled, censored, and forced to conform to the conventions of a society in which one is marginalized; and to unearth a neglected and potentially rich account of the modern self. (shrink)

David Enoch, in his paper “Why Idealize?”, argues that theories of normative reasons that hold that normative facts are subject or response-dependent and include an idealization condition might have a problem in justifying the need for idealization. I argue that at least some response-dependence conceptions of normative reasons can justify idealization. I explore two ways of responding to Enoch’s challenge. One way involves a revisionary stance on the ontological commitments of the normative discourse about reasons. To establish (...) this point, I argue by analogy with the case of color perception. To make the analogy, it suffices to show that even if colors are response-dependent properties, it does not follow that some kind of idealization cannot be introduced to specify the truth conditions of color ascriptions. The second route involves the denial of Enoch’s contention that our normative discourse is implicitly committed to a realist ontology. I adduce reasons for thinking that our normative discourse only presupposes a possibility of misrepresentation. However, this feature of the normative discourse does not favor robustly objectivist as opposed to response-dependence accounts of normative reasons. Thus, I argue that proponents of response-dependence accounts can use this feature to answer the question of why to idealize. (shrink)

Chap. V: Generalizations of the Rule of Correspondence ... 71 1. Generalizations and Extensions 71 2. A Certain Generalization of the Concepts of ...

하버마스의 담론윤리는 담론의 참여자들이 현실적으로 충족시키기 어려운 ‘이상적 담화 상황’을 가정한다는 점에서 현실 상황을 고의로 왜곡한다는 비판에 직면한다. 이는 이상화를 중심 전략으로 삼는 영미 윤리학에 대한 비판과도 맥이 닿아 있다. 그러나 나는 담론윤리가 채택하는 독특한 최소주의적 이상화 전략 앞에서 이상화에 대한 전통적인 비판은 별다른 위력을 발휘하지 못한다고 생각한다. 가설적 상황을 다소간 자의적으로 도입하는 다른 이상화 이론과 비교해볼 때, “의사소통 자체의 구조로부터 생겨나는” 하버마스의 이상적 담화 상황은 참여자들이 임의로 피해갈 수 없는 성격을 지니기 때문이다. 나는 담론윤리 이상화의 이렇듯 고유한 강점으로 말미암아 (...) 담론윤리가 이상화에 기초한 여타 도덕 이론과는 달리 실천성과 타당성을 모두 확보할 수 있음을 주장한다. 물론 담론윤리에서조차 이상적 상황을 통해 도출한 도덕규범이 타당하지 못할 위험은 여전히 남아 있는바, 나는 이 글의 또 다른 목표로서 그러한 의혹에 맞설 만한 예비적 해석을 마련하고자 한다. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright (1983, 1999) argues that (1) the fundamental laws of physics are true when and only when appropriate ceteris paribus modifiers are attached and that (2) ceteris paribus modifiers describe conditions that are almost never satisfied. She concludes that when the fundamental laws of physics are true, they don't apply in the real world, but only in highly idealized counterfactual situations. In this paper, we argue that (1) and (2) together with an assumption about contraposition entail the opposite conclusion (...) — that the fundamental laws of physics do apply in the real world. Cartwright extracts from her thesis about the inapplicability of fundamental laws the conclusion that they cannot figure in covering-law explanations. We construct a different argument for a related conclusion — that forward-directed idealized dynamical laws cannot provide covering-law explanations that are causal. This argument is neutral on whether the assumption about contraposition is true. We then discuss Cartwright's simulacrum account of explanation, which seeks to describe how idealized laws can be explanatory. (shrink)

How can an ideal of human flourishing reveal what attributes are virtues, as eudaimonism aspires to do, when not all virtuous lives flourish? The standard answer is that even if circumstances prevent one from attaining that idealized life, still one’s life approximates to the ideal the more one’s character approximates to the ideal. However, exploration of methods of idealization reveals that “approximation” is ill-suited to contexts in which factors interact, as virtue and circumstance do. Instead, eudaimonism helps us understand (...) the distinctive excellence of humans by providing a perspective on what is distinctly human about a distinctly human mode of life, namely practical intelligence in making use of one’s circumstances, whatever they may be. This is an alternative understanding of the method of idealization in eudaimonism about virtue, and so the chapter ends with reflections on some uses and limits of idealization in virtue theory. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to consider the influence of the methodological status of the concept of the totalitarian syndrome on the strategy of its development. It is argued that the totalitarian syndrome as put forward by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski represented a kind of social modelling. However, there are different approaches to modelling in the social sciences. Modelling, when perceived from a neo-Hegelian perspectives, leads to the elaboration of dependencies between social phenomenon and their main factors. (...) Modelling, when seen from a neo-Weberian perspective, relies on the construction of notions which systematize and order social phenomena. This hypothesis is illustrated by a methodological analysis of the extension of the totalitarian syndrome authored by Achim Siegel and Mark R. Thompson. (shrink)

This paper addresses the methodological problem of analysing what it is to explain observed behaviours of engineered computing systems, focusing on the crucial role that abstraction and idealization play in explanations of both correct and incorrect BECS. First, it is argued that an understanding of explanatory requests about observed miscomputations crucially involves reference to the rich background afforded by hierarchies of functional specifications. Second, many explanations concerning incorrect BECS are found to abstract away from descriptions of physical components and (...) processes of computing systems that one finds below the logic circuit and gate layer of functional specification hierarchies. Third, model-based explanations of both correct and incorrect BECS that are provided in the framework of formal verification methods often involve idealizations. Moreover, a distinction between restrictive and permissive idealizations is introduced and their roles in BECS explanations are analysed. (shrink)

Husserl's contributions to the nature of mathematical knowledge are opposed to the naturalist, empiricist and pragmatist tendences that are nowadays dominant. It is claimed that mainstream tendences fail to distinguish the historical problem of the origin and evolution of mathematical knowledge from the epistemological problem of how is it that we have access to mathematical knowledge.

A critical review of Collin Rice's book, Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science.

L’épistémologie du désaccord s’est développée autour d’une notion idéalisée de pairs épistémiques. L’analyse d’exemples dans la littérature a quelque peu enraciné cette idéalisation, surtout lorsque les exemples étudiés sont des désaccords tirés du canon philosophique contemporain et qu’ils opposent des interlocuteurs identifiés. Il est difficile, pour des raisons socio-professionnelles, de souligner les manières ordinaires par lesquelles ces collègues disciplinaires peuvent se tromper. Il est probablement d’autant plus facile de négliger ces possibilités que les attitudes concernant l’importance du génie dans la (...) pratique de la philosophie sont fort répandues dans le domaine. L’utilisation de ces exemples limite donc la prise en compte de toutes les caractéristiques épistémiquement pertinentes des désaccords. (shrink)

: The theory of objective value is the central feature in the paradigm of political economy. The Newtonian heritage plays a major role in giving political economy the status of a self-standing empirical science, and a reconstruction of this heritage casts fresh light on the idea of value and its role in the definition of the subject matter of political economy. Cognitive progress carried by classical political economy turns out to be related with the dilemmas of Newtonian epistemology and the (...) alternative between essentialist realism and instrumental conventionalism. (shrink)