Antonio Lizzadri

Given the increasing specialization of contemporary philosophical inquiry, this paper asks whether philosophy can still be conceived as a unitary form of knowledge endowed with a fundamental function underlying its various branches. It argues that the essential nature of philosophy lies in thought's never‐ending metatheoretical self‐transcendence towards ever more comprehensive explanations and justifications. The paper defends this metaphilosophical conception by showing how it provides a coherent interpretation of epistemological and semantic holism within a realist ontological framework. Building primarily on Hilary Putnam's contribution to the contemporary debate on holism and realism, it develops this metatheoretical integration of metaphilosophy and epistemology from a pragmatic‐transcendental perspective. Philosophy thus emerges as an open and unitary system of mutually irreducible yet interconnected theoretical metastructures, preserving both the constitutive openness and the unity of knowledge as a whole.

This paper aims to explore the theoretical connections between the metaphysical model of reality known as “internal realism” and the so-called “computational” model of the mind. These models seem to be incompatible, since internal realism can be interpreted as an antirealist metaphysical view—in which we can’t go beyond our conceptual schema and we can only consider reality as fiction—while the computational model of the mind can be interpreted as a reductionist anthropological view, in which the human mind is reduced to mere syntactic computation and the human brain to a mere machinery, so that—in contrast to metaphysical antirealism—a fundamental level of knowledge and reality is asserted. I maintain that this opposition is not the only philosophical option and that it rather depends on a partial and dichotomic interpretation of both models, that does not consider their possible theoretical connections. More precisely, I argue that the computational model of the mind can play an important explanatory role with respect to the ontological relativity that essentially characterizes the internal realist view.

This paper aims to renew the “deflationary” interpretation of Ramsey’s theory of truth, with respect to his declared “pragmatist tendency,” which was not completely developed due to his premature death. This aim is not only historical-philosophical, but also exquisitely theoretical, since the mediation of pragmatism allowed Ramsey to achieve an original synthesis among different philosophical instances. In order to show this, I pay attention to the debate between Ramsey and some spokespeople of the leading British philosophical traditions at the beginning of the twentieth century (especially Neo-idealism, Neo-empiricism, and Oxford Realism), through which it will stand out how Ramsey’s logical analysis of the truth predicate was embedded within a wider theoretical context, involving a pragmatic theory of knowledge and even a “general psychological theory.” Indeed, the truth of a belief will be defined in relation to mental factors, in so far as they involve a successful disposition to behave.

The article aims at deepening and making explicit the influence of pragmatism on the thought of Hilary Putnam, moving from the analysis of some of his earlier writings, in which the reference to pragmatism was still very much implicit. In particular, although focused on the classical neopositivist questions of the philosophy of science on which Putnam has been trained, the essays What Theories Are Not (1962) and The “Corroboration” of Theories (1974) betray some original pragmatist options already. The article will review the pragmatist undertones in Putnam’s criticism of contemporary epistemology in order to test its promises.