Esbozo de una concepción particularista de las Leyes Lógicas

El Anti-Excepcionalismo Lógico afirma que la Lógica es como cualquier otra ciencia. Si esta afirmación es cierta, entonces ella no sólo es revisable, sino que además todo lo que se puede decir sobre las ciencias aplica, mutatis mutandis, para la misma. El propósito de este artículo es explorar esta consecuencia del Anti-Excepcionalismo Lógico, acercando a la Filosofía de la Lógica el marco teórico de las Máquinas Nomológicas de Nancy Cartwright. De acuerdo con esta visión, lo que hay de verdadero en las teorías científicas no está en el mundo sino en sus modelos: sistemas altamente controlados, estables, artificiales y específicos, dentro de los cuales se manifiestan regularidades sistematizables y enseñables. Mi afirmación es que lo mismo puede decirse de la Lógica: ella no captura las Leyes del Pensamiento o de la Razón, porque el pensamiento y la razón no están gobernados necesariamente por leyes. Sobre lo que sí puede decirse que versan las Leyes de la Lógica son metafísicas posibles: historias acerca de qué son las proposiciones, el pensamiento, la verdad y la validez. A fin de ilustrar y defender esta tesis, presento un ejemplo de Máquina Nomológica de la Lógica Clásica, basada en una lectura original del Tractatus de Wittgenstein, e investigo algunas de sus consecuencias. Mi conclusión es que esta imagen de la Lógica impacta en el problema de la revisión de la Lógica Clásica, en la medida en que muestra que dicha revisión no necesariamente responde a un proceso racional de adecuación de la teoría a los hechos porque los “hechos” relevantes no son anteriores a la teoría misma, sino que están moldeados y conducidos por ella. Palabras clave: Anti-Excepcionalismo Lógico, Abductivismo, Máquinas Nomológicas, Revisión Lógica, Filosofía de la Lógica.

The Return of Causal Powers?

Andreas Hüttemann disagrees with Hill and Ott regarding the relevance of the early modern critiques of causal powers for contemporary practitioners. He argues that the contemporary acceptance of powers and dispositions is insulated against the early modern criticism because the emergence of powers nowadays is not a ‘revival of’ or ‘return to’ the Aristotelian or scholastic version of causal powers. Hüttemann traverses two lines of argumentation in his defence of the contemporary metaphysics of powers. First, he maintains that the early modern critics utilized a version of causation that, because it was rooted in the doctrine of substantial forms, was quite strong and restrictive and that, consequently, their criticisms don’t apply to contemporary notions of powers, which utilize a counterfactual conception of causation. Then, he turns in a different direction to defend Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie’s use of the Extrapolation Argument in favour of the postulation of dispositions and powers.

Agency, Force, and Inertia in Descartes and Hobbes

Deborah Brown looks at how Hobbes and Descartes used the language of ‘tendency’ in their natural philosophies. She contrasts the problems that arise for Hobbes as he tries to reduce tendencies away with a Descartes, for whom ‘tendency talk is not a mere façon de parler’ but rather is ‘real and causally explanatory’, and who strives to incorporate inherent tendencies into his broader mechanistic ontological framework. The resulting interpretation of Descartes sees him as much closer in his conception of natural laws to Nancy Cartwright than to David Lewis. One of the real benefits of this interpretation, claims Brown, is that it ‘might just help to demystify Descartes’s references to active forces’. Having thus establishing that Descartes was a realist about tendencies who nevertheless remained committed to a non-teleological, mechanistic account of nature, Brown contrasts this Cartesian picture with Hobbes’s reductive mechanics that eliminated forces and tendencies by equating them with actual motions, including even the ‘force of a body at rest’.

Evidence-based policies, nudge theory and Nancy Cartwright: a search for causal principles

Nancy Cartwright argues that evidence-based policies should not only rely on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to test their effectiveness – they should also use horizontal and vertical searches to find support factors and causal principles that help define how those policies work. This paper aims at analyzing Cartwright's epistemology regarding evidence-based policies and their use of RCTs while applying her findings to current research involving nudges as behavioral public policy interventions. Holding a narrowly instrumental view of rationality, nudge theory tends to neglect other expressive components. Policymakers, in their quest for causal principles, should consider the expressive rationality of individuals in their research. This inclusion would not only increase the effectiveness of nudges, but also address some ethical issues related to people's autonomy when targeted by these interventions.

Roy Bhaskar’s Core Critical Realism and the Philosophy of Nancy Cartwright: Common Ground

This paper compares Roy Bhaskar’s core critical realism with the philosophy of science of Nancy Cartwright. It argues for either profound similarity or exact correspondence between the two on a number of key elements: strong realism, depth ontology, closed and open systems, intransitive and transitive dimensions of science, philosophical method, emergence and stratification, and explanatory critique. Through detailed, side-by-side textual comparison this paper provides a rigorous first step for critically engaging, and ultimately integrating, two influential and highly complementary philosophies of science.

No God, No Powers

One common feature of debates about the best metaphysical analysis of putatively lawful phenomena is the suspicion that nomic realists who locate the modal force of such phenomena in quasi-causal necessitation relations between universals are working with a model of law that cannot convincingly erase its theological pedigree. Nancy Cartwright distills this criticism into slogan form: no God, no laws. Some have argued that a more plausible alternative for nomic realists who reject theism is to ground laws of nature in the fundamental dispositional properties or “pure powers” of physical objects. This article argues that for all its advantages over deflationary and rival realist accounts, a pandispositionalist account of law cuts against the commitment to metaphysical naturalism that its supporters almost always presuppose. It then examines and rejects a Platonic version of this account before elaborating and advancing a theistic alternative that is more theoretically powerful and more metatheoretically parsimonious. In slogan form: no God, no powers.

Interaction Model of Brain and Consciousness

In addition to the spectrum model, I also introduced an interaction model to characterize the brain’s neural activity (chapter 2). Is the interaction model of brain also relevant for consciousness? That is the focus in the present chapter. I here present various lines of empirical evidence focusing on disorders of consciousness like vegetative state, anesthesia, and sleep. Based on empirical evidence, I show that the degree of non-additive interaction between spontaneous and stimulus-induced activity indexes the level of consciousness in a seemingly rather fine-grained way; for that reason, it may be considered a neural correlate of the level of consciousness, i.e., NCC. In contrast, the spontaneous activity and its spatiotemporal structure is rather a necessary condition of possible consciousness, that is, a neural predisposition of consciousness (NPC). The concept of NPC is further enriched by the concept of capacities for which I recruit Nancy Cartwright. I suggest that the brain’s non-additive interaction including the subsequent association of stimulus-induced activity with consciousness is based on the spontaneous activity’s capacity. Since that very same capacity, operating as NPC, can be traced to the spontaneous activity’s spatiotemporal features, I speak of “spatiotemporal capacity”. I conclude that the empirical data suggest a capacity-based approach (rather than law-based approach) to the brain and how it is related to consciousness.