Peter Smith

Gary Ebbs: Quine's Naturalistic Explication of Carnap's Logic of Science: If one studies Quine's epistemology without appreciating its deep connections to Carnap's logic of science, one can easily get the impression that unlike Carnap, Quine aims to preserve and clarify the traditional empiricist idea that our best theories of nature are justified by, or based on, our sensory evidence, and are for that reason likely to be true. Quine writes, for instance, that [The] human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input—certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance—and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three‐dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence. Commenting on this and similar passages in Quine, Barry Stroud writes: … the question Quine poses in terms of the “underdetermination” of the “torrential output” by the “meager input” makes essential use of a notion of epistemic priority. It is because the “information” we get at “input” does not uniquely determine the truth of what we assert as “output” that we must explain how we get from the one to the other. I argue that despite its superficial plausibility, this interpretation of Quine is mistaken: following Carnap, yet also radically transforming his views, Quine takes our best current theory as our ultimate arbiter of truth. The goal of Quine's naturalistic account of the relationship between theory and evidence is not to show that our best theories of nature are justified by our sensory evidence, but to show that we can describe science from within science itself in a way that mirrors and thereby clarifies his doctrinal principle that we can only judge truth from the standpoint of our best current theory.

Where to begin? I’ll take three books from my shelves. First, now nearly forty years old, a little book of television lectures by the great physicist Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. He talks about the laws of motion, the inverse square law of gravitation, conservation laws, symmetry principles and the various ways these all hang together. Feynman obviously takes it that it is a prime aim of science to discover such laws. But what are laws? He writes – and this is about his one and only shot at a characterization at the level of abstraction that we might think of as philosophical –.

Chaotic dynamics has been hailed as the third great scientific revolution in physics this century, comparable to relativity and quantum mechanics. In this book, Peter Smith takes a cool, critical look at such claims. He cuts through the hype and rhetoric by explaining some of the basic mathematical ideas in a clear and accessible way, and by carefully discussing the methodological issues which arise. In particular, he explores the new kinds of explanation of empirical phenomena which modern dynamics can deliver. Explaining Chaos will be compulsory reading for philosophers of science and for anyone who has wondered about the conceptual foundations of chaos theory.

Metaphysics is once again a thriving subdiscipline within philosophy, despite a long tradition of challenges to the very viability of the metaphysical enterprise. The criticisms have not so much been satisfactorily answered, as shouldered aside by the vigorous development of the field. Some focused meta-theoretic discussion has recently arisen within mainstream metaphysics.1 The present paper is written more from an outsider's vantage point. I attempt to give a new meta-theory for some parts of metaphysics. The central claim is that much metaphysical work, especially of the contemporary systematic kind, might best be understood as model-building, in a specific sense of this term that draws on recent philosophy of science.

“Triviality arguments” against functionalism in the philosophy of mind hold that the claim that some complex physical system exhibits a given functional organization is either trivial or has much less content than is usually supposed. I survey several earlier arguments of this kind, and present a new one that overcomes some limitations in the earlier arguments. Resisting triviality arguments is possible, but requires functionalists to revise popular views about the “autonomy” of functional description.

Drawing on models of communication due to Lewis and Skyrms, I contrast sender-receiver systems as they appear within and between organisms, and as they function in the bridging of space and time. Within the organism, memory can be seen as the sending of messages over time, communication between stages as opposed to spatial parts. Psychological memory and genetic memory are compared with respect to their relations to a sender-receiver model. Some puzzles about “genetic information” can be resolved by seeing the genome as a cell-level memory with no sender

A “sender–receiver” framework based on models developed in several fields can provide a general treatment of communicative and symbolic phenomena, replacing traditional semiotic theories that have failed to live up to the hopes of their advocates. Sender–receiver models have mostly been applied to linguistic behavior, gestures, and other ephemeral interactions between individuals. I look at the application of this framework to enduring artifacts, including pictures, using indigenous rock art in Australia as a case study.

Research in archaeology and anthropology on the evolution of modern patterns of human behavior often makes use of general theories of signs, usually derived from semiotics. Recent work generalizing David Lewis’ 1969 model of signaling provides a better theory of signs than those currently in use. This approach is based on the coevolution of behaviors of sign production and sign interpretation. I discuss these models and then look at applications to human prehistoric behavior, focusing on body ornamentation, tools, and other artifacts.