Perspectival Instruments

Despite its potential implications for the objectivity of scientific knowledge, the claim that ‘scientific instruments are perspectival’ has received little critical attention. I show that this claim is best understood as highlighting the dependence of instruments on different perspectives. When closely analysed, instead of constituting a novel epistemic challenge, this dependence can be exploited to mount novel strategies for resolving two old epistemic problems: conceptual relativism and theory ladeness. The novel content of this paper consists in articulating and developing these strategies by introducing two fine-grained notions of perspectives as the key units of analysis: ‘broad perspectives’ and ‘narrow perspectives’

Overinterpretation or appropriation?

The article discusses various approaches to interpretation, which understand it as a universal method of the humanities. Particular attention we paid to the interpretations in U. Eco and E. Batti, who, although do not agree with each other, however, are opposed both to the philosophic or analytic understanding of interpretation, which we call the appropriationist approach. The way of interpreting the past inherent in appropriationism often threatens with overinterpretation, for which it is criticized by adepts of contextualism. We analyze the interpretation through the prism of three skeptical arguments we offered, “conceptual relativism”, “Gorgians’ minds”, “the part and the whole”. Skeptical arguments are often used in philosophy as an additional filter for testing the consistency of the concepts, and it is clearly seen that the contextualist concept of interpretation does not pass this filter. The thesis that appropriation is indeed a overinterpretation can be accepted under reserve that for a strictly philosophical way of reasoning and from within appropriationism, another version of interpretation is inconsistent.

Conceptual Schemes and Relativism

The idea of conceptual schemes is one of the most influential and widely used notions in contemporary philosophy. Within the analytic tradition the idea occupies a fundamental position in positivist views as well as in replacing them post-positivist conceptions. Outside the analytic tradition a similar idea is of key importance in structuralist and post-structuralist theories. Despite the broad applicability of the notion of a conceptual scheme, its precise sense is far from being evident in the context of various philosophical trends. Moreover, the well-known American philosopher Donald Davidson's position is that any clear, non-metaphorical meaning cannot be as - cribed to that notion at all – the statement which he tried to substantiate in his famous paper On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme published in 1974.The present paper is aimed, firstly, at outlining the historico-philosophical evolution of the idea of conceptual scheme, concentrating on its development in logical positivism and post-positivist theories of such philosophers as Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, et al., and, secondly, at examining Davidson's criticism of both the idea and the position of conceptual relativism which was raised on its ground, revealing the assumptions which that criticism relies on and which concern relations between language and thought, truth and translation, as well as the role of the scheme-content dualism for empiricism and the place of extensionalism in semantics, etc. Our purpose, on the one hand, is to evaluate the historico-philosophical significance of Davidson's criticism; on the other hand, it is to show that his critical arguments remain to be actual since they shed a new light on the idea of conceptual schemes and allow us to determine their place in tackling the fundamental philosophical question of a relation between reality, thought and language.

On philosophy of mind, quantum physics and metaphysics of the uni-multiverse

Metaphysics, as discipline dealing with the most fundamental aspects of reality, studies the essence of entities, leaving to particular sciences the study of empirical, specific, changeable and unstable aspects. In this sense metaphysics is close to ontology, tackling problems as the existence of God, the being in himself, the immortality of consciousness, the origin and meaning of the universe. Speculative physics pushes its interest to metaphysical questions too, both at atechnical (mathematical) level, and at the level of thought (in relation to philosophy). In recentyears interesting concepts and ideas have been considered and developed, involving the latest unified quantum-relativistic theories and the consequences on reality deriving from them.The search for a meaning of life, one of Anscombe’s themes, finds ferment in the search for meaning about the existence of our universe in itself and as a possible part of a multiverse containing it.The problem of measurement in quantum mechanics appears from the application of themathematical formalism to macroscopic situations and the central position of the observer in this process has produced a deviation towards a metaphysical subjectivism. There are controversial aspects about the role of consciousness in the process of reducing the wave function of quantum mechanics. This narrows the field of validity of some fundamental principles during the interaction between microsystems and macrosystems, with consequent diversification of thedefinition of the ontological state of consciousness and reality. (Local) holism has often been linked to Wittgenstein. From Wittgenstein’s answers to the paradoxes of communication and conceptual relativism, a tension emerges in his vision of linguistic games and in his mental experiments, traditionally interpreted in contrasting ways. This tension can be better understoodthrough some reflections by Wittgenstein on Einstein and his theory of relativity.

MACKIE’S ERROR THEORY: A WITTGENSTEINIAN CRITIQUE

I start by arguing that Mackie’s claim that there are no objective values is a nonsensical one. I do this by ‘assembling reminders’ of the correct use of the term ‘values’ and by examining the grammar of moral propositions à la Wittgenstein. I also examine Hare’s thought experiment which is used to demonstrate “that no real issue can be built around the objectivity or otherwise of moral values” before briefly looking at Mackie’s ‘argument from queerness’. In the final section I propose that Robert Arrington’s ‘conceptual relativism’, inspired by Wittgenstein, helps to make our use of moral language more perspicuous and avoids the problems faced by Mackie.