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1187Risk and trustIn Sabine Roeser, Rafaela Hillerbrand, Martin Peterson & Per Sandin (eds.), Handbook of Risk Theory, Springer. 2012.
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IntroductionAustralasian Philosophical Review 6 (1): 1-5. 2022.1. With his lead article on Grace Mead (Andrus) de Laguna, Joel Katzav [2022a] has initiated a valuable addition to recent discussions of women in the history of philosophy. De Laguna was one of se...
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533On the emergence of American analytic philosophyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (4): 772-798. 2017.ABSTRACTThis paper is concerned with the reasons for the emergence and dominance of analytic philosophy in America. It closely examines the contents of, and changing editors at, The Philosophical Review, and provides a perspective on the contents of other leading philosophy journals. It suggests that analytic philosophy emerged prior to the 1950s in an environment characterized by a rich diversity of approaches to philosophy and that it came to dominate American philosophy at least in part due t…Read more
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115Extended cognition and epistemologyPhilosophical Explorations 15 (2). 2012.Philosophical Explorations, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 87-90, June 2012
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405Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers (edited book)Springer. 2023.This book is the first volume featuring the work of American women philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century. It provides selected papers authored by Mary Whiton Calkins, Grace Andrus de Laguna, Grace Neal Dolson, Marjorie Glicksman Grene, Marjorie Silliman Harris, Thelma Zemo Lavine, Marie Collins Swabey, Ellen Bliss Talbot, Dorothy Walsh and Margaret Floy Washburn. The book also provides the historical and philosophical background to their work. The papers focus on the nature of …Read more
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170Chapter 12 IntroductionIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 117-129. 2023.This chapter introduces the articles by Marie C. Swabey, Thelma Z. Lavine, Grace A. de Laguna and Dorothy Walsh on the objectivity of scientific knowledge. We will see Swabey placing herself outside the historicist traditions of (later) authors (e.g., Thomas Kuhn), and arguing that the rationality and objectivity of science are grounded in synthetic a priori justified logical principles. Lavine and de Laguna, by contrast, embrace socio-historical approaches to the study of science, thus anticipa…Read more
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121The Reliability of Armchair IntuitionsMetaphilosophy 44 (5): 559-578. 2013.Armchair philosophers have questioned the significance of recent work in experimental philosophy by pointing out that experiments have been conducted on laypeople and undergraduate students. To challenge a practice that relies on expert intuitions, so the armchair objection goes, one needs to demonstrate that expert intuitions rather than those of ordinary people are sensitive to contingent facts such as cultural, linguistic, socio-economic, or educational background. This article does exactly t…Read more
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43The National Science Foundation and philosophy of science's withdrawal from social concernsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 78 (C): 73-82. 2019.At some point during the 1950s, mainstream American philosophy of science began increasingly to avoid questions about the role of non-cognitive values in science and, accordingly, increasingly to avoid active engagement with social, political and moral concerns. Such questions and engagement eventually ceased to be part of the mainstream. Here we show that the eventual dominance of 'value-free' philosophy of science can be attributed, at least in part, to the policies of the U.S. National Scienc…Read more
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316Cultural Relativism and ScienceIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 149-166. 2023.In this chapter, Grace Andrus de Laguna examines cultural relativism and its bearing on science.
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8Philosophical Implications of the Historical EnterpriseIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 167-173. 2023.In this chapter, Dorothy Walsh examines the nature of historical inquiry.
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226Ethics and MetaphysicsIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 43-50. 2023.In this chapter, Dorothy Walsh argues that any ethical theory requires an underlying speculative metaphysics.
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7Relativism and Philosophic MethodsIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 59-65. 2023.In this chapter, Marjorie Glicksman argues that the validity of philosophical positions is relative to philosophical methodology.
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8The Nature, Types, and Value of PhilosophyIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 35-41. 2023.This chapter is Mary Whiton Calkins’ discussion of, and support for, the identification of philosophy with speculative metaphysics.
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10Probability as the Basis of InductionIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 131-136. 2023.In this chapter, Marie Collins Swabey discusses the problem of induction and offers her response to it.
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6Sociological Analysis of Cognitive NormsIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 137-148. 2023.In this chapter, Thelma Zeno Lavine argues that the sociology of knowledge should subject the norms of knowledge to socio-historical analysis.
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196Chapter 2 IntroductionIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 23-34. 2023.This chapter uses the distinction between speculative and analytic philosophy as a background against which to present the summaries of the articles on the nature of philosophy by Mary Whiton Calkins, Dorothy Walsh and Marjorie Glicksman. Calkins and Walsh (in her first contribution) examine the relationship between philosophy and metaphysics: Calkins identifies philosophy with speculative metaphysics while Walsh argues that any ethical theory requires some underlying speculative metaphysics. In…Read more
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10The Poetic Use of LanguageIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 51-57. 2023.In this chapter, Dorothy Walsh examines the natures of the language of science and logic, the language of poetry, and the language of philosophy. She argues that each of these languages has its own distinct form of excellence.
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21Demographic explanations of neanderthal extinction: a reply to Currie and MeneganzinBiology and Philosophy 38 (2): 1-6. 2023.In a recent paper, Currie and Meneganzin (Biol Phil, 2022, 37, 50) critically engage with a recent demographic explanation of the demise of Neanderthals (Vaesen et al. 2019). Currie and Meneganzin suggest that, contrary to how it is (supposedly) presented, Vaesen et al.’s explanation is not (and in fact, could never be) ‘stand-alone’, i.e., competition and environmental factors always interfere with demographic ones. Here I argue that Currie and Meneganzin misconstrue what the study in question …Read more
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365American women philosophers: institutions, background and thoughtIn Joel Katzav, Dorothy Rogers & Krist Vaesen (eds.), Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers, Springer. pp. 1-20. 2023.This chapter provides the background to the American women philosophers’ works that are introduced and collected in Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers. We describe the institutional context which made these works possible and their methodological and theoretical background. We also provide biographies for their authors.
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316Pluralism and Peer Review in PhilosophyPhilosophers' Imprint 17. 2017.Recently, mainstream philosophy journals have tended to implement more and more stringent forms of peer review, probably in an attempt to prevent editorial decisions that are based on factors other than quality. Against this trend, we propose that journals should relax their standards of acceptance, as well as be less restrictive about whom is to decide what is admitted into the debate. We start by arguing, partly on the basis of the history of peer review in the journal Mind, that past and curr…Read more
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789The rise of logical empiricist philosophy of science and the fate of speculative philosophy of scienceHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 12 (2): 000-000. 2022.This paper contributes to explaining the rise of logical empiricism in mid-twentieth century (North) America and to a better understanding of American philosophy of science before the dominance of logical empiricism. We show that, contrary to a number of existing histories, philosophy of science was already a distinct subfield of philosophy, one with its own approaches and issues, even before logical empiricists arrived in America. It was a form of speculative philosophy with a concern for specu…Read more
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17A new framework for teaching scientific reasoning to students from application-oriented sciencesEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2): 1-16. 2021.About three decades ago, the late Ronald Giere introduced a new framework for teaching scientific reasoning to science students. Giere’s framework presents a model-based alternative to the traditional statement approach—in which scientific inferences are reconstructed as explicit arguments, composed of (single-sentence) premises and a conclusion. Subsequent research in science education has shown that model-based approaches are particularly effective in teaching science students how to understan…Read more
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43French Neopositivism and the Logic, Psychology, and Sociology of Scientific DiscoveryHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (1): 183-200. 2021.This article is concerned with one of the notable but forgotten research strands that developed out of French nineteenth-century positivism, a strand that turned attention to the study of scientific discovery and was actively pursued by French epistemologists around the turn of the nineteenth century. I first sketch the context in which this research program emerged. I show that the program was a natural offshoot of French neopositivism; the latter was a current of twentieth-century thought that…Read more
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6How will we find the elephant in the room?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43. 2020.We argue that Osirak's and Reynaud's technological-reasoning hypothesis raises conceptual and methodological challenges. Interrelations between technical potential and expertise leave it unclear exactly what the technical-reasoning hypothesis encompasses. We submit that it is compatible with a range of hypotheses that are difficult to differentiate empirically.
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36Complexity and technological evolution: What everybody knows?Biology and Philosophy 32 (6): 1245-1268. 2017.The consensus among cultural evolutionists seems to be that human cultural evolution is cumulative, which is commonly understood in the specific sense that cultural traits, especially technological traits, increase in complexity over generations. Here we argue that there is insufficient credible evidence in favor of or against this technological complexity thesis. For one thing, the few datasets that are available hardly constitute a representative sample. For another, they substantiate very spe…Read more
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64Optimality vs. intent: Limitations of Dennett's artifact hermeneuticsPhilosophical Psychology 21 (6). 2008.Dennett has argued that when people interpret artifacts and other designed objects ( such as biological items ) they rely on optimality considerations , rather than on designer's intentions. On his view , we infer an item's function by finding out what it is best at; and such functional attribution is more reliable than when we depend on the intention it was developed with. This paper examines research in cognitive psychology and archaeology , and argues that Dennett's account is implausible. We…Read more
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110Critical Discussion: Virtue Epistemology and Extended Cognition: A Reply to Kelp and Greco (review)Erkenntnis 78 (4): 963-970. 2013.Elsewhere, I have challenged virtue epistemology and argued that it doesn’t square with mundane cases of extended cognition. Kelp (forthcoming, this journal) and Greco (forthcoming) have responded to my charges, the former by questioning the force of my argument, the latter by developing a new virtue epistemology. Here I consider both responses. I show first that Kelp mischaracterizes my challenge. Subsequently, I identify two new problems for Greco’s new virtue epistemology
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628How norms in technology ought to be interpretedTechne 10 (1): 117-133. 2006.This paper defends the claim that there are — at least — two kinds of normativity in technological practice. The first concerns what engineers ought to do and the second concerns normative statements about artifacts. The claim is controversial, since the standard approach to normativity, namely normative realism, actually denies artifacts any kind of normativity; according to the normative realist, normativity applies exclusively to human agents. In other words, normative realists hold that only…Read more
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50What exists in the environment that motivates the emergence, transmission, and sophistication of tool use?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (4): 233. 2012.In his attempt to find cognitive traits that set humans apart from nonhuman primates with respect to tool use, Vaesen overlooks the primacy of the environment toward the use of which behavior evolves. The occurrence of a particular behavior is a result of how that behavior has evolved in a complex and changing environment selected by a unique population
Eindhoven, North Brabant, Netherlands
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |