Catalin Barboianu

Research on epistemic circularity has focused more on the problem of whether circular arguments are able to justify their conclusions rather than on the nature of circularity itself, and has kept a sharp delimitation from other types of circularities (logical, linguistic, and of definition). In this paper, I aim to move the focus toward the general concept of circularity, which I relate to the concept of ‘epistemic worry’. Through a brief overview on the known types of circularities, I show that circularity has multiple natures (not only that associated with its type), and the linguistic aspect is essential in qualifying a construct as circular, which in turn raises the problem of genuineness of a circularity. Within an extensional approach, I suggest generalizing the meaning of the key epistemological terms referred to in the classical definition of epistemic circularity to also cover additional associated concepts specific to other theoretical disciplines beyond epistemology. The proposed concepts and ideas are reflected in a structural unificatory account of circularity in terms of epistemic determination, which raises a challenge to the relational accounts of determination in regard to the transitivity of the determination relation.

Research on interdisciplinarity has been concentrated on the methodological and educational aspects of this complex phenomenon and less on its theoretical nature. Within a theoretical framework specific to the philosophy of science, I propose a structural scheme of how interdisciplinary processes go, focusing on the concepts of availability of the methods, concept linking, and theoretical modeling. In this model, the challenges interdisciplinarity is claimed to pose to its practitioners are of the same nature as the challenges scientists encounter within the evolution of their own disciplines.

Attempts at solving what has been labeled as Eugene Wigner’s puzzle of applicability of mathematics are still far from arriving at an acceptable solution. The accounts developed to explain the “miracle” of applied mathematics vary in nature, foundation, and solution, from denying the existence of a genuine problem to designing structural theories based on mathematical formalism. Despite this variation, all investigations treated the problem in a unitary way with respect to the target, pointing to one or two ‘why’ or ‘how’ questions to be answered. In this paper, I argue that two analyses, a semantic analysis ab initio and a metatheoretical analysis starting from the types of unreasonableness involved in this problem, will establish the interdisciplinary character of the problem and reveal many more targets, which may be addressed with different methodologies. In order to address objectively the philosophical problem of applicability of mathematics, a foundational revision of the problem is needed.