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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Epistemic Categories And Causal Kinds, P.D. Magnus
Epistemic Categories And Causal Kinds, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Within philosophy of science, debates about realism often turn on whether posited entities exist or whether scientific claims are true. Natural kinds tend to be investigated by philosophers of language or metaphysicians, for whom semantic or ontological considerations can overshadow scientific ones. Since science crucially involves dividing the world up into categories of things, however, issues concerning classification ought to be central for philosophy of science. Muhammad Ali Khalidi's book fills that gap, and I commend it to readers with an interest in scientific taxonomy and natural kinds. He works through general issues to craft a useful philosophical conception and …
Science And Rationality For One And All, P.D. Magnus
Science And Rationality For One And All, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
A successful scientific community might require different scientists to form different beliefs even when faced with the same evidence. The standard line is that this would create a conflict between the demands of collective rationality which scientists face as members of the community and the demands of individual rationality which they face as epistemic agents. This is expressed both by philosophers of science (working on the distribution of cognitive labor) and by epistemologists (working on the epistemology of disagreement). The standard line fails to take into account the relation between rational belief and various epistemic risks, values of which are …
Are Digital Pictures Allographic?, Jason R. D'Cruz, P.D. Magnus
Are Digital Pictures Allographic?, Jason R. D'Cruz, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Nelson Goodman's distinction between autographic and allographic arts is appealing, we suggest, because it promises to resolve several prima facie puzzles. We consider and rebut a recent argument that alleges that digital images explode the autographic/allographic distinction. Regardless, there is another familiar problem with the distinction, especially as Goodman formulates it: it seems to entirely ignore an important sense in which all artworks are historical. We note in reply that some artworks can be considered both as historical products and as formal structures. Talk about such works is ambiguous between the two conceptions. This allows us to recover Goodman's distinction: …
Hobbes, Definitions, And Simplest Conceptions, Marcus P. Adams
Hobbes, Definitions, And Simplest Conceptions, Marcus P. Adams
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Several recent commentators argue that Thomas Hobbes’s account of the nature of science is conventionalist. Engaging in scientific practice on a conventionalist account is more a matter of making sure one connects one term to another properly rather than checking one’s claims, e.g., by experiment. In this paper, I argue that the conventionalist interpretation of Hobbesian science accords neither with Hobbes’s theoretical account in De corpore and Leviathan nor with Hobbes’s scientific practice in De homine and elsewhere. Closely tied to the conventionalist interpretation is the deductivist interpretation, on which it is claimed that Hobbes believed sciences such as optics …