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Articulating The World: Conceptual Understanding And The Scientific Image, Joseph Rouse

Joseph Rouse

The most difficult challenge for naturalists in philosophy is accounting for scientific understanding of nature as itself a scientifically intelligible natural phenomenon. This book advances naturalism with a novel response to this challenge, drawing upon the philosophy of scientific practice and interdisciplinary science studies, philosophical work on the normativity of conceptual understanding, and new developments in evolutionary biology. The book’s two parts develop complementary, mutually supporting revisions to familiar accounts of conceptual understanding and of Sellars’s “scientific image” of ourselves-in-the-world. The first part shows how language and scientific practices exemplify the evolutionary process of niche construction. Conceptual capacities arise from …