James Bogen

Standard philosophical discussions of theory-ladeness assume that observational evidence consists of perceptual outputs (or reports of such outputs) that are sentential or propositional in structure. Theory-ladeness is conceptualized as having to do with logical or semantical relationships between such outputs or reports and background theories held by observers. Using the recent debate between Fodor and Churchland as a point of departure, we propose an alternative picture in which much of what serves as evidence in science is not perceptual outputs or reports of such outputs and is not sentential in structure.

Empiricists claim that in accepting a scientific theory one should not commit oneself to claims about things that are not observable in the sense of registering on human perceptual systems (according to Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism) or experimental equipment (according to what I call liberal empiricism ). They also claim scientific theories should be accepted or rejected on the basis of how well they save the phenomena in the sense delivering unified descriptions of natural regularities among things that meet their conditions for observability. I argue that empiricism is both unfaithful to real world scientific practice, and epistemically imprudent, if not incoherent. To illuminate scientific practice and save regularity phenomena one must commit oneself to claims about causal mechanisms that can be detected from data, but do not register directly on human perceptual systems or experimental equipment. I conclude by suggesting that empiricists should relax their standards for acceptable beliefs

One of the earliest and most influential treatises on the subject of this volume is Aristotle's Categories. Aristotle's title is a form of the Greek verb for speaking against or submitting an accusation in a legal proceeding. By the time of Aristotle, it also meant: to signify or to predicate. Surprisingly, the "predicates" Aristotle talks about include not only bits of language, but also such nonlinguistic items as the color white in a body and the knowledge of grammar in a man's soul. (Categories I/ii) Equally surprising are such details as Aristotle's use of the terms 'homonymy' and 'synonymy' in connection with things talked about rather than words used to talk about them. Judging from the evidence in the Organon, the Metaphysics, and elsewhere, Aristotle was both aware of and able to mark the distinction between using and men tioning words; and so we must conclude that in the Categories, he was not greatly concerned with it. For our purposes, however, it is best to treat the term 'predication' as if it were ambiguous and introduce some jargon to disambiguate it. Code, Modrak, and other authors of the essays which follow use the terms 'linguistic predication' and 'metaphysical predication' for this.

James Bogen - The Possibility of Language: Internal Tensions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 167-169 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by James Bogen University of Pittsburgh María Cerezo. The Possibility of Language: Internal Tensions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. CSLI Lecture Notes, 147. Stanford: CSLI, 2005. Pp. xiv + 321. Paper, $30.00. The Possibility of Language is a difficult, painstakingly detailed interpretation and evaluation of central doctrines of the Tractatus. It is not easy reading, but most readers who soldier through it will find their prospects of coming to grips with the Tractatus significantly improved. Cerezo constrains her reading as tightly as she can by what she finds good textual and historical reasons to believe the early Wittgenstein was thinking about. She acknowledges and elaborates on what she takes to be serious internal tensions rather than forcing the Tractatus to make sense where she cannot find any. To avoid anachronism, she scrupulously refrains from trying to resolve difficulties by bringing the Tractatus into line with contemporary views. In keeping with her focus on Wittgenstein's text, she does not attempt to survey the extensive literature on the Tractatus. Instead, she limits herself to brief comments on..

'IRS' is our term for the logical empiricist idea that the best way to understand the epistemic bearing of observational evidence on scientific theories is to model it in terms of Inferential Relations among Sentences representing the evidence, and sentences representing hypotheses the evidence is used to evaluate. Developing ideas from our earlier work, including 'Saving the Phenomena'(Phil Review 97, 1988, p.303-52 )we argue that the bearing of observational evidence on theory depends upon causal connections and error characteristics of the processes by which data is produced and used to detect features of phenomena. Neither of these depends upon, or is greatly illuminated by a consideration of, formal relations among observation and theoretical sentences or propositions. By taking causal structures and error characteristics, you too can evade the IRS. In doing so, you can gain insight into Hempel’s raven paradox, theory loading, and other issues from the standard philosophical literature on confirmation theory.

According to a received doctrine, espoused, by Karl Popper and Harry Collins, and taken for granted by many others, poorly replicated evidence should be epistemically defective and incapable of persuading scientists to accept the views it is used to argue for. But John Hughlings Jackson used poorly replicated clinical and post-mortem evidence to mount rationally compelling and influential arguments for a highly progressive theory of the organization of the brain and its functions. This paper sets out a number of Jackson's arguments from his evidence and argues that they constitute a counter example against the received doctrine

I claim that the Hodgkin‐Huxley (HH) current equations owe a great deal of their importance to their role in bringing results from experiments on squid giant action preparations to bear on the study of the action potential in other neurons in other in vitro and in vivo environments. I consider ideas from Weber and Craver about the role of Coulomb’s and other fundamental equations in explaining the action potential and in HH’s development of their equations. Also, I offer an embellishment to Schaffner’s emergent unifier conception of the HH model. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of HPS, University of Pittsburgh, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e‐mail: [email protected].