Ekaterina Vostrikova

The paper presents a survey of issues that are being currently studied as part of the research project called “Science and eco­nomics”. By discussing a number of leading articles the authors illustrate the main directions in which the research of the issues of financing science proceeds today. Among these directions are the consequences of the growing impact of private and corpo­rate financing of science. Some negative trends associated with this impact are exposed, such as manipulation of research re­sults and others. Another aspect is the ethos of a scientist that undergoes various transformations when pragmatic factors en­ter into the mix of criteria according to which the professional status of a scientist is determined.Two important organizational aspects of the contemporary institution of science are also criti­cally discussed. They are the system of research grants and the process of peer-review. Each of the aspects reveals its shortcom­ings which are argued to be inevitable consequences of the im­pact of economics on science. The authors argue that contempo­rary investigations of science and economics reveal the influence that the economic organization of a society has on the scientific results produced by those who are responsible for them inside that society.

This article provides an overview of current research in the field of STS on neoliberalism. The paper discusses the major changes in science associated with the spread of neoliberalism. The following key aspects of neoliberalism influence on the development of science are discussed: the increasing commercialization of science (on the examples of commercialization of meteorology and privatization of stream restoration); an increasing influence of scientism in regulation of technology; and an increasing role of social activism in this regulation.

The paper explores the contextualist approach towards the semantics of knowledge ascriptions. The authors discuss the relevance of these studies in semantics for the major issues in virtue epistemology. It is argued that despite the advantages that contextualism has over its alternatives (in particular, relativism and subject sensitive invariablisism), it still requires a more elaborated compositional semantics that it currently has. We review several concrete contextualsit proposals to the semantics of the verb know in light of their applicability to the well-known type of examples known as the fake barn example, point out some of their particular shortcomings, and propose a revision, which represents a variant of D. Lewis’s general approach to the semantics of know.

This paper is an overview of the contemporary discussions in interdisciplinary studies of meaning of natural language expressions. The paper discusses the latest work published in two interdisciplinary journals «Linguistics and Philosophy» and «Natural Language Semantics» most relevant for philosophy of language. The paper focuses on two general topics: the semantics of singular terms (proper names, pronouns, demonstratives) and the semantics of belief-reports. The paper discusses the recent proposal about the interpretation of pronouns by [Stojnic et al., 2019] according to which such interpretation is strictly determined by the linguistic rules and does not depend on the context. According to this proposal, the referent of a pronoun is determined by a specific coherence relationship the sentence it occurs in has to the previous sentence in a discourse unless it is preceded by a pointing gesture. The paper discuses some issues with this proposal. Specifically, it discusses its difficulties with explaining the cases where the referent of a pronoun stands out in a context and, thus, no pointing gesture or previous discourse is required for the referent identification. It also discusses cases where a coherence relationship (such as Narration) between two sentences allows flexibility with respect to the referent identification and points at pragmatic factors that can be relevant in this respect. The paper also presents some other recent research on proper names, demonstratives and pronouns both linguistically and philosophically oriented.The paper also presents informally some work on belief-reports in linguistics and discussed its relevance for philosophy of language. It discusses the recent work on restrictions on the types of embeddings of propositional attitude verbs and the general approach that derives those restrictions from the predicted meanings of the relevant sentences, such as [Theiler et al., 2019]. The paper discussed the relevance of this issue to a more general question about the nature of a natural language and the relationship between language and logic.

In this article, we examine the key ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt about language and their relevance to the contemporary research in the field of linguistics. In his works, N. Chomsky describes Humboldt as a key predecessor of the generative approach. The authors discuss the concrete aspects of Humboldt’s influence on generative linguistics drawing special attention to his notion of Form. The authors also observe that Humboldt’s works also contain statements about the deep differences that exist between different languages, as well as statements that different languages can form different pictures of the world. These ideas resonate with philosophical ideas about linguistic relativity (the famous Sapir – Whorf hypothesis), which are incompatible with generative linguistics. The authors try to reconcile an apparent contradiction by appealing to two different perspectives on language that they call the dynamic and the static one. They provide arguments in favor of the former and explore existing arguments against the later, which is associated with the aforementioned hypothesis. The authors conclude by pointing out that Humboldt’s legacy has so many facets that it introduces to incompatible views on language each of which had a serious impact on the studies of language in the 20th century.

The authors explore Carnap’s (1931) famous critique of Heidegger’s metaphysics and argue that, from the perspective of contemporary formal semantics of natural language, Carnap’s criticism is not convincing. Moreover, they provide direct empirical objections to Carnap’s criticism. In particular, using empirical evidence from languages like Russian that have negative concord, they show that Heidegger cannot be accused of assigning illegitimate logical forms to his sentences about Nothing because terms like “Nothing” can be used non-quantificationally and the fact that it is not clear how their reference is established cannot be the reason why the corresponding sentences are ungrammatical (as Carnap seemed to suggest). The authors also critically discuss the view that natural language is insensitive to meaninglessness or contradiction. With reference to the work of J. Gajewsky, they show that this view is not true either. As a result of this investigation, they arrive at a position that an appeal to ungrammaticality like the one proposed by Carnap does not provide legitimate evidence against metaphysics. This conclusion relates to some recent criticism of the so-called non-analytical philosophers that can be traced back to Carnap’s paper.

In this overview article, we explore a number of trends in the rational philosophy of science that have been developed in reaction to the development of the relativist program of social constructivism. These trends are also known as isolationism, reconciliationism, and integrationism. According to the isolationist view, the core of science is immune to the influence of social factors and the scientific enterprise retains its autonomy. The proponents of this view point out the shortcomings and internal inconsistencies inside the constructivist argumentation and dismiss their arguments on those grounds. Reconciliationists agree that social factors can influence the process of decision making in individuals and they accept the idea that decisions in science are not bused exclusively on rational arguments. The core of science, however, still remains intact, from the reconsiliationist perspective. Integrationists tend to redefine science by including the “extra-scientific” agenda into discussions of science. Still, they do not reduce science to “non-scientific” phenomena. Having built this perspective, we then move on to the discussion the practical issues that arise in the process of bringing the scientific agenda closer to the needs of society. This process has been treated as crucial in helping societies to get the most out of science, given the significant gap that exists today between the rationalistic ideal of pure science and the complicated and socially dependent nature of scientific institutions. The latter very often suffer from the impact of extra-scientific values. Yet, we also present work suggesting that such values can be beneficial. We end our discussion with concrete suggestions of democratization of science that have recently been proposed in the literature on philosophy of science.

This article provides an overview of current research in the field of STS on neoliberalism. The paper discusses the major changes in science associated with the spread of neoliberalism. The following key aspects of neoliberalism influence on the development of science are discussed: the increasing commercialization of science (on the examples of commercialization of meteorology and privatization of stream restoration); an increasing influence of scientism in regulation of technology; and an increasing role of social activism in this regulation.