Color Primitivism and Neo-pragmatism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Gert
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kinds ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
The World ◽  
Color Primitivism ◽  
Descriptive Language

This chapter responds to criticisms raised by Jonathan Cohen, on behalf of reductionists, to the Benacerraf-style argument for color primitivism offered in Chapter One. The response stresses the fact that the argument for primitivism is perfectly consistent with the idea that some ostensively taught terms—terms for natural kinds, for example—refer to properties that have hidden essences that are the business of empirical science to determine. In this way, the Benacerraf-style argument is perfectly consistent with the idea that water is identical to H2O. The chapter also presents in much more detail the neo-pragmatism on which the book relies throughout. Rather than making the a priori assumption that descriptive language must function by making use of words that “latch on” via a substantive relation of reference to objects and properties out there in the world, the neo-pragmatist takes a more empirical view of language that reflects a deeper naturalism.

Algebra As Thought Experiment

1998 ◽  
pp. 106-111
Author(s):  
Jagdish Hattiangadi
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Algebraic Method ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
The World ◽  
Synthetic A Priori

This paper addresses the problem of understanding what mathematics contributes to the exceptional success of modern mathematical physics. I urge that we give up the Kantian construal of the division between mathematics (synthetic a priori) and physics (experimental), and that we ask instead how algebra helps synthetic a posteriori mathematics improve our ability to study the world. The theses suggested are: 1) Mathematical theories are about the empirical world, and are true or false just like other theories of empirical science. 2) The air of artificiality in mathematics lies exclusively in the use of algebraic method. 3) This method is constructive much like all fiction is, but this construction is for the purpose of experimental investigation of the physical world to the extent that anything in the world has objects like those in the fictional world of a particular algebra. 4) This is why algebraic techniques are successful even when the assumptions of the system are false: they may still be applicable to some things considered from some perspective. 5) The success of mathematical physics is also due to Descartes' discovery of a remarkable truth: we live in space and time which can be described as a whole. 6) Therefore, what distinguishes modern science from earlier and later philosophy is not a general method of science, but the fact that it happened to find a truth, and a particular way of studying reality which bore fruit.

Considering Territorial Agendas of the EU in context of Rising of Territorial Dimension of Cohesion Policy

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-257
Author(s):  
İclal Kaya Altay ◽  
◽  
Shqiprim Ahmeti ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Sustainable Growth ◽  
The Other ◽  
Lisbon Strategy ◽  
Cohesion Policy ◽  
Setting Process ◽  
The World ◽  
Territorial Cohesion ◽  
Descriptive Language ◽  
The Eu

The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe ads territorial cohesion as Union’s third goal, beside economic and social cohesion and lists it as a shared competence. In the other hand, the Lisbon Strategy aims to turn Europe into the most competitive area of sustainable growth in the world and it is considered that the Territorial cohesion policy should contribute to it. This paper is structured by a descriptive language while deduction method is used. It refers to official documents, strategies, agendas and reports, as well as books, articles and assessments related to topic. This paper covers all of two Territorial Agendas as well as the background of territorial cohesion thinking and setting process of territorial cohesion policy.

1968: On Social, Epistemic, and Historiographic(?) Revolutions

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto D. Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Young Students ◽  
Historic Significance ◽  
Agent Of Change

This article addresses the meaning and significance of the “world revolution of 1968,” as well as the historiography of 1968. I critically interrogate how the production of a narrative about 1968 and the creation of ethnic studies, despite its world-historic significance, has tended to perpetuate a limiting, essentialized and static notion of “the student” as the primary actor and an inherent agent of change. Although students did play an enormous role in the events leading up to, through, and after 1968 in various parts of the world—and I in no way wish to diminish this fact—this article nonetheless argues that the now hegemonic narrative of a student-led revolt has also had a number of negative consequences, two of which will be the focus here. One problem is that the generation-driven models that situate 1968 as a revolt of the young students versus a presumably older generation, embodied by both their parents and the dominant institutions of the time, are in effect a sociosymbolic reproduction of modernity/coloniality’s logic or driving impulse and obsession with newness. Hence an a priori valuation is assigned to the new, embodied in this case by the student, at the expense of the presumably outmoded old. Secondly, this apparent essentializing of “the student” has entrapped ethnic studies scholars, and many of the period’s activists (some of whom had been students themselves), into said logic, thereby risking the foreclosure of a politics beyond (re)enchantment or even obsession with newness yet again.

How Reality is Reasonable

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Dimensional Manifold ◽  
The World ◽  
Being There ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Fundamental Entity ◽  
Spatiotemporal Relations ◽  
Priori Knowledge

This chapter begins with a systematic presentation of the doctrine of actualism. According to actualism, all that exists is actual, determinate, and of one way of being. There are no possible objects, nor is there any indeterminacy in the world. In addition, there are no ways of being. It is proposed that actual entities stand in three fundamental relations: mereological, spatiotemporal, and resemblance relations. These relations govern the fundamental entities. Each fundamental entity stands in parthood relations, spatiotemporal relations, and resemblance relations to other entities. The resulting picture is one that represents the world as a four-dimensional manifold of actual ‘qualitied contents’—upon which all else supervenes. It is then explained how actualism accounts for classes, quantity, number, causation, laws, a priori knowledge, necessity, and induction.

Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Structural Description ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
The World ◽  
Empirical Realism

This chapter presents a straightforward structural description of Immanuel Kant’s conception of what the transcendental deduction is supposed to do, and how it is supposed to do it. The ‘deduction’ Kant thinks is needed for understanding the human mind would establish and explain our ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to something we seem to possess and employ in ‘the highly complicated web of human knowledge’. This is: experience, concepts, and principles. The chapter explains the point and strategy of the ‘deduction’ as Kant understands it, as well as the demanding conditions of its success, without entering into complexities of interpretation or critical assessment of the degree of success actually achieved. It also analyses Kant’s arguments regarding a priori concepts as well as a posteriori knowledge of the world around us, along with his claim that our position in the world must be understood as ‘empirical realism’.

scholarly journals Plato on Natural Kinds: The Promethean Method of the Philebus

Apeiron ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Proios
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract Plato’s invention of the metaphor of carving the world by the joints (Phaedrus 265d–66c) gives him a privileged place in the history of natural kind theory in philosophy and science; he is often understood to present a paradigmatic but antiquated view of natural kinds as possessing eternal, immutable, necessary essences. Yet, I highlight that, as a point of distinction from contemporary views about natural kinds, Plato subscribes to an intelligent-design, teleological framework, in which the natural world is the product of craft and, as a result, is structured such that it is good for it to be that way. In Plato’s Philebus, the character Socrates introduces a method of inquiry whose articulation of natural kinds enables it to confer expert knowledge, such as literacy. My paper contributes to an understanding of Plato’s view of natural kinds by interpreting this method in light of Plato’s teleological conception of nature. I argue that a human inquirer who uses the method identifies kinds with relational essences within a system causally related to the production of some unique craft-object, such as writing. As a result, I recast Plato’s place in the history of philosophy, including Plato’s view of the relation between the kinds according to the natural and social sciences. Whereas some are inclined to separate natural from social kinds, Plato holds the unique view that all naturalness is a social feature of kinds reflecting the role of intelligent agency.

Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the “Doctrine of Essence”

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Houlgate
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Logical Structure ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
The World

It is a commonplace among certain recent philosophers that there is no such thing as the essence of anything. Nietzsche, for example, asserts that things have no essence of their own, because they are nothing but ceaselessly changing ways of acting on, and reacting to, other things. Wittgenstein, famously, rejects the idea that there is an essence to language and thought — at least if we mean by that some a priori logical structure underlying our everyday utterances. Finally, Richard Rorty urges that we “abandon […] the notion of ‘essence’ altogether”, along with “the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences”.It would be wrong to maintain that these writers understand the concept of essence in precisely the same way, or that they are all working towards the same philosophical goal. Nevertheless, they do share one aim in common: to undermine the idea that there is some deeper reality or identity underlying and grounding what we encounter in the world, what we say and what we do. That is to say, they may all be described as anti-foundationalist thinkers — thinkers who want us to attend to the specific processes and practices of nature and humanity without understanding them to be the product of some fundamental essence or “absolute”.

scholarly journals The weirdest people in the world?

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 61-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Henrich ◽  
Steven J. Heine ◽  
Ara Norenzayan
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Spatial Reasoning ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Behavioral Sciences ◽  
The World ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Behavioral Phenomenon

AbstractBehavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

scholarly journals Reconstruindo sentidos na interface de histórias: uma discussão fenomenológico-existencial da constituição do sujeito borderline

2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Anna Karynne da Silva MELO ◽  
Georges Daniel Janja Bloc BORIS ◽  
Violeta STOLTENBORG
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Borderline Personality ◽  
Gestalt Therapy ◽  
Disease Classification ◽  
Existential Phenomenology ◽  
Borderline Disorder ◽  
The World ◽  
Borderline Patients ◽  
Health And Sickness

This paper discusses a clinical case of a 40 years old woman, diagnosed as a borderline personality disorder, conforming to CID-10 (2003). The paper proposes, by a concrete clinical experience, to discuss the phenomenological and existential psychopathology. At first, it describes borderline disorder according to existential phenomenology. So, the authors discuss the conceptions about the relation between health and sickness in Gestalt-Therapy and Daseins-analysis, trying to understand the way of 'being-in-the-world' and the constitution of the psychopathological phenomenon in borderline patients from the perspective of the construction of his life story, that is unique. At the end, the authors detach the great challenge of existential-phenomenological psychotherapist: putting the patient's clinical picture in stand by 'a priori' and considering how she expresses herself and sees the world, giving up the mere disease classification itself.

scholarly journals A benchmarking procedure for PIGE related differential cross-sections

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
M. Axiotis ◽  
A. Lagoyannis ◽  
S. Fazinić ◽  
S. Harrisopulos ◽  
M. Kokkoris ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Differential Cross Section ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Cross Sections ◽  
Differential Cross ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Light Element ◽  
Thick Target ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Differential Cross Sections ◽  
The World

The application of standard-less PIGE requires the a priori knowledge of the differential cross section of the reaction used for the quantification of each detected light element. Towards this end, a lot of datasets have been published the last few years from several laboratories around the world. The discrepancies found can be resolved by applying a rigorous benchmarking procedure through the measurement of thick target yields. Such a procedure is proposed in the present paper and is applied in the case of the 19F(p,p’γ)19F reaction.

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