-
61The Metaphysics of MeasurementIn J. Forge (ed.), Measurement, Realism and Objectivity: Essays on Measurement in the Social and Physical Sciences, Springer Verlag. 1987.My thesis is that there are good reasons for a philosophical account of measurement to deal primarily with the properties or magnitudes of objects measured, rather than with the objects themselves. The account I present here embodies both a realism about measurement and a realism about the existence of the properties involved in measurement. It thus provides an alternative to most current treatments of measurement, many of which are operationalistic or conventionalistic, and nearly all of which …Read more
-
24C. Stephen Layman. The power of logic. Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, Calif., London, and Toronto, 1999, ix + 566 pp (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 7 (1): 79-81. 2001.
-
5Abstract entitiesIn Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary debates in metaphysics, Blackwell. 2008.
-
325Structural representation and surrogative reasoningSynthese 87 (3). 1991.It is argued that a number of important, and seemingly disparate, types of representation are species of a single relation, here called structural representation, that can be described in detail and studied in a way that is of considerable philosophical interest. A structural representation depends on the existence of a common structure between a representation and that which it represents, and it is important because it allows us to reason directly about the representation in order to draw conc…Read more
-
51
-
29The New Dialectic (review)Philosophical Review 110 (2): 291-295. 2001.These books are part of Douglas Walton’s project to develop a new theoretical framework for informal logic. The first book, on his new dialectic, is extremely ambitious; the goal is nothing less than to construct a systematic and comprehensive theory of rationality that can provide the basis for the normative evaluation of real-life arguments in real-life settings. The second book, on ad hominem arguments, provides an extended application of the framework developed in the first book. Since the f…Read more
-
44The early, largely automatic stages of human visual processing involve things like feature detectors (e.g., edge detectors) that do not involve our concepts or beliefs. These stages are called data-driven or bottom up aspects of perceptual information processing. But in the later stages of processing perception often is affected by our concepts, beliefs, and expectations. Such processes are said to be hypothesis-driven or expectation-driven; they are also known as..
-
541How ontology might be possible: Explanation and inference in metaphysicsMidwest Studies in Philosophy 23 (1). 1999.
-
1Leibniz's calculus of real additionStudia Leibnitiana 26 (1): 1-30. 1994.In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird Leibniz' wahrscheinlich detailliertestes und ausgefeiltestes System untersucht: ein Kalkül der Einfügung und eine der Konjunktion ähnliche Operation, die er realis abjectio nennt. Das System soll hinreichend detailliert und mit hinreichender Präzision vorgestellt werden, um zu zeigen, daβ es ausgefeilt formal logisch ist und eine Anzahl originärer und wichtiger Züge aufweist. Neben seinem eigenständigen Interesse ist dieses System wichtig wegen seiner Auswirkungen…Read more
-
22
-
20Review: C. Stephen Layman, The Power of Logic (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 7 (1): 79-81. 2001.
-
2PropertiesIn Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Metaphysics Research Lab. 2014.
-
10Review of John W. Carroll: Laws of Nature (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (4): 603-609. 1995.
-
68Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think of it, in the sense that people in Germany speak German, is a historical or social or political notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one another than various dialects of Chinese are. But the rough, commonsense divisions between languages will suffice for our purposes.
Norman, Oklahoma, United States of America