Claudia Cristalli

"Psychical phenomena" is an umbrella term that referred generally to phenomena allegedly produced by spiritual forces or entities. In this chapter, we encounter four instances of these manifestations: table moving, mediumistic communication, "telepathic" communication, and apparitions. All of these instances offer the opportunity to capture different declinations of "control." First, "control" is mostly about controlling the setting (i.e., the instrument(s), the people's perceptions, or the people's testimonies), rather than about controlling a result against a comparative trial (as it is most of then the case for the chapters in this volume). Second, in some cases "control" is an actors' term, a rare occurrence in this volume. Third, the actors presented in this chapter deploy two distinct but parallel (and ultimately intertwining) strategies of control, which are called -- by the actors themselves -- "experimental" and "historical."

Standard citation-based bibliometric tools have severe limitations when they are applied to periods in the history of science and the humanities before the advent of now-current citation practices. This paper presents an alternative method involving the extracting and analysis of mentions to map and analyze links between scholars and texts in periods that fall outside the scope of citation-based studies. Focusing on one specific discipline in one particular period and language area—Anglophone philosophy between 1890 and 1979—we describe a procedure to create a mention index by identifying, extracting, and disambiguating mentions in academic publications. Our mention index includes 1,095,765 mention links, extracted from 22,977 articles published in 12 journals. We successfully link 93% of these mentions to specific philosophers, with an estimated precision of 82% to 91%. Moreover, we integrate the mention index into a database named EDHIPHY, which includes data and metadata from multiple sources and enables multidimensional mention analyses. In the final part of the paper, we present four case studies conducted by domain experts, demonstrating the use and the potential of both EDHIPHY and mention analyses more generally.

This paper describes our reconstruction of the apparatus used in C.S. Peirce and Joseph Jastrow’s 1885 psychophysical experiment, “On Small Differences of Sensation” and how it relates to persistent questions in scientific theories of measurement. We situate Peirce and Jastrow’s work in the broader context of nineteenth-century discussions about the status of psychology as a science and emphasize the role of measurement and experiment in determining that status. Through our re-enactment of the experiment, we analyze the experiment’s methodology, which features blinding, randomization, noise control, and a technology for data recording. Our claims are illustrated by images of historical and reconstructed apparatuses, as well as graphs of the data collected in our reproduction. Our findings exemplify the relevance of history of psychology for contemporary philosophy of science and theories of measurement, and defend experimental reconstructions as a particularly fertile method of inquiry in the history of psychophysical sciences.

Charles Sanders Peirce was acknowledged by William James as the founder of pragmatism; however, while James’ appreciation for psychology is well taken into account in his philosophy, the role that psychological inquiry played in Peirce’s thought remains largely unexplored. Few excellent studies indicate Peirce as the first American experimental psychologist (Cadwallader 1974, 1975; Fisch 1986) and as the first to perform a truly modern experiment in psycho-physics (Hacking 1988). Nonetheless, Peirce’s commitment to psycho-physics fails to be fully integrated with the broader project of his philosophy. This integration is crucial to gain a better understanding of the complexity of Peirce’s system of thought and of his position in the psychologistic-antipsychologistic divide. On the logical side, making Peirce’s position on psychology explicit leads to investigating his material logic; on the psychological side, Peirce’s scientific approach to psychology has its theoretical foundation in Kant and further marks the distinction between Peirce’s pragmatism and James’.

Abstraction and generalization are two processes of reasoning that have a special role in the construction of scientific theories and models. They have been important parts of the scientific method ever since the nineteenth century. A philosophical and historical analysis of scientific practices shows how abstraction and generalization found their way into the theory of the logic of science of the nineteenth-century philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Our case studies include the scientific practices of Francis Galton and John Herschel, who introduced composite photographs and graphical methods, respectively, as technologies of generalization and thereby influenced Peirce’s logic of abstraction. Herschel’s account of generalization is further supported by William Whewell, who was very influential on Peirce. By connecting Herschel’s scientific technology of abstraction to Peirce’s logical technology of abstraction—namely, diagrams—we highlight the role of judgments in scientific observation by hypostatic abstractions. We also relate Herschel’s discovery-driven logic of science and Peirce’s open-ended diagrammatic logic to the use of models in science. Ultimately, Peirce’s theory of abstraction is a case of showing how logic applies to reality.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Venn. A Life in Logic by Lukas M. VerburgtClaudia CristalliLukas M. VerburgtJohn Venn. A Life in Logic Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 411 pp., incl. indexThis is the first intellectual biography of John Venn (1834–1923), British logician, “philosopher and antiquarian” (DNB). Until now, Venn had not been studied as a philosophical figure in its own right. He is mostly remembered today for the “Venn Diagrams,” a graphical device illustrating logical relations such as inclusion, exclusion, conjunction, disjunction, and for having systematically articulated a frequentist theory of probability. Together with an in-depth account of Venn’s logical developments, of his studies in probability theory, and of its applications to history and to anthropometry, Lukas M. Verburgt brings to life Venn’s spiritual struggles within—and eventually out of— his family’s religion, evangelicalism. Verburgt’s reconstruction is substantiated by many extracts from Venn’s correspondence and private notes, which add substantially to the value of this biography. (Of note is Verburgt’s 2022 editon of Venn’s unpublished writings and slected correspondence, which can be considered a companion to this biography).While showing the connections of epistemology, religion and academic politics in Victorian Cambridge, Verburgt contributes an important chapter in the history of logic and of empiricist philosophy.The book opens with a chapter on Venn’s childhood and early youth (1834–53), largely drawn from manuscript material of the Venn family—the “Parentalia”—and from Venn’s Annals of a Clerical Family, where he included “autobiographical recollections” (p. 2). The chapter introduces the reader to the values of a prominent evangelical family and to their peculiar way of understanding Christianity as a faith to be embedded in habit and to be taught by example. The following two [End Page 385] chapters follow Venn’s development, first as a student at Caius college, Cambridge (1853–57) and then as a country curate; the chapters elaborate on the institutional history of the college and on parish life from the perspective of evangelical orthodoxy. Chapter 4 is still chronologically situated within Venn’s early clerical service but is arranged thematically around his first publication (1862), “Science of History,” which contains some elements of the fundamental ideas elaborated in the Logic of Chance (1866): namely, that probability theory could only make predictions about long-run frequencies of events, and never about individual cases (p. 77). The core of Venn’s argument in 1862 revolved around possible atheistic implications of a science of history. If at some point it would be possible to predict future events, would there still be free will? Or a God? In his reply, Venn maintained that any prediction concerning individual agents could be defeated by assuming that the agent gets to know the prediction and changes her actions accordingly (pp. 74–76).After the publication of the “Science of History” essay, Venn left the parish for Cambridge, where he worked first as a Catechist (1862– 1867) and then as a moral sciences lecturer. Verburgt devotes chapter 5 to that and to the Cambridge milieu, where Venn sides for university reforms and engages with the Grote Club, all while drifting away from evangelical orthodoxy. After laying out Venn’s theory of probability (Chapter 6), Verburgt returns to an integrated analysis of Venn’s scientific and religious thought in chapter 7. This chapter may be particularly relevant for pragmatist readers, since here Verburgt highlights the commonalities between Venn’s “religious logic” and the notion of belief that will be expressed in more detail by pragmatism. Verburgt focuses on Venn’s logic in three subsequent chapters (Chapters 8, 9 and 11). Considered together, they provide a comprehensive history of Venn’s logical development, which Verburgt proudly announces as the first of this kind (p. xx). The last chapter on Venn’s logic (Chapter 11) also includes Verburgt’s argument for “includ[ing] Venn in the local history of early analytic philosophy at Cambridge” (p. 262). Chapters 10 and 12 recount Venn’s last years with particular emphasis on his interests in natural and historical sciences; they provide relevant material for scholars interested in the history and philosophy of...