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1335Risk and trustIn Sabine Roeser (ed.), Handbook of Risk Theory: Epistemology, Decision Theory, Ethics, and Social Implications of Risk, Springer Science & Business Media. 2012.
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5IntroductionAustralasian 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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613On 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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119Extended cognition and epistemologyPhilosophical Explorations 15 (2). 2012.Philosophical Explorations, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 87-90, June 2012
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582Knowledge, 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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220Chapter 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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124The 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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52The 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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11Philosophical 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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435Cultural 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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327Ethics 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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10Relativism 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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11The 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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16Probability 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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10Sociological 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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258Chapter 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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15The 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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31Demographic 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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434American 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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375Pluralism 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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955The 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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25A 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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47French 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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11How 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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44Complexity 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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61Dewey on extended cognition and epistemologyPhilosophical Issues 24 (1): 426-438. 2014.There is a surge of attempts to draw out the epistemological consequences of views according to which cognition is deeply embedded, embodied and/or extended. The principal machinery used for doing so is that of analytic epistemology. Here I argue that Dewey's pragmatic epistemology may be better fit to the task. I start by pointing out the profound similarities between Dewey's view on cognition and that emerging from literature of more recent date. Crucially, the benefit of looking at Dewey is t…Read more
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958Modelling the truth of scientific beliefs with cultural evolutionary theorySynthese 191 (1). 2014.Evolutionary anthropologists and archaeologists have been considerably successful in modelling the cumulative evolution of culture, of technological skills and knowledge in particular. Recently, one of these models has been introduced in the philosophy of science by De Cruz and De Smedt (Philos Stud 157:411–429, 2012), in an attempt to demonstrate that scientists may collectively come to hold more truth-approximating beliefs, despite the cognitive biases which they individually are known to be s…Read more
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49How Norms in Technology Ought to Be InterpretedTechné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 10 (1): 95-108. 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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21Chimpocentrism and reconstructions of human evolutionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (1): 12-21. 2014.Chimpanzees, but very few other animals, figure prominently in attempts to reconstruct the evolution of uniquely human traits. In particular, the chimpanzee is used to identify traits unique to humans, and thus in need of reconstruction; to initialize the reconstruction, by taking its state to reflect the state of the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees; as a baseline against which to test evolutionary hypotheses. Here I point out the flaws in this three-step procedure, and show how t…Read more
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40From individual cognition to populational cultureBehavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (4): 245-262. 2012.In my response to the commentaries from a collection of esteemed researchers, I reassess and eventually find largely intact my claim that human tool use evidences higher social and non-social cognitive ability. Nonetheless, I concede that my examination of individual-level cognitive traits does not offer a full explanation of cumulative culture yet. For that, one needs to incorporate them into population-dynamic models of cultural evolution. I briefly describe my current and future work on this.
Eindhoven, North Brabant, Netherlands
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |