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Truth and provability: A comment on RedheadBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (3): 611-613. 2005.
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”Mirage realism” or ”positivism in naturalism's clothing”?Acta Philosophica Fennica 84 63. 2008.In 1980 a very interesting exchange of views between three distinguished philosophers took place. Two years earlier Armstrong had, in his already classical two-volume book on universals (Armstrong 1978a, 1978b), mentioned, in passing, Quinean positions as ”Ostrich or Cloak-anddagger Nominalism”, by which he referred to philosophers who refuse to countenance universals but who at the same time see no need for any reductive analysis. In the symposium in question (’Symposium: Nominalism’, Pacific P…Read more
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The Semantic Realism/Anti-Realism Dispute and Knowledge of MeaningsThe Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 5 1-13. 2009.Here the relationship between understanding and knowledge of meaning is discussed from two different perspectives: that of Dummettian semantic anti-realism and that of the semantic externalism of Putnam and others. The question addressed is whether or not the truth of semantic externalism would undermine a central premise in one of Dummetts key arguments for anti-realism, insofar as Dummetts premise involves an assumption about the transparency of meaning and semantic externalism is often taken …Read more
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On Carnap sentencesAnalysis 71 (2): 245-246. 2011.
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Intuitionistic logic and its philosophyAl-Mukhatabat. A Trilingual Journal For Logic, Epistemology and Analytical Philosophy (6): 114-127. 2013.
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Can The Mental be Causally Efficacious?In Talmont-Kaminski K. Milkowski M. (ed.), Regarding the Mind, Naturally: Naturalist Approaches to the Sciences of the Mental, Cambridge Scholars Press. 2013.
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What Was Analytic Philosophy?Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 2 (1): 11-27. 2013.
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Gödel’s Disjunction: The Scope and Limits of Mathematical Knowledge (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 39 (4): 401-403. 2018.
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Explanation and Understanding RevisitedIn Niiniluoto Ilkka & Wallgren Thomas (eds.), On the Human Condition: Philosophical Essays in Honour of the Centennial Anniversary of Georg Henrik von Wright. Acta Philosophica Fennica vol 93., The Philosophical Society of Finland. pp. 339-353. 2017."Explanation and Understanding" (1971) by Georg Henrik von Wright is a modern classic in analytic hermeneutics, and in the philosophy of the social sciences and humanities in general. In this work, von Wright argues against naturalism, or methodological monism, i.e. the idea that both the natural sciences and the social sciences follow broadly the same general scientific approach and aim to achieve causal explanations. Against this view, von Wright contends that the social sciences are qualitati…Read more
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Kim on Causation and Mental CausationE-Logos Electronic Journal for Philosophy 25 (2). 2018.
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Truth and Theories of TruthIn Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press. 2021.The concept of truth and competing philosophical theories on what truth amounts to have an important place in contemporary philosophy. The aim of this chapter is to give a synopsis of different theories of truth and the particular philosophical issues related to the concept of truth. The literature on this topic is vast, and we must necessarily be rather selective and very brief about complex questions of interpretation of various philosophers. The focus of the chapter is mainly on selected syst…Read more
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Gödel's Incompleteness TheoremsThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.). 2013.Gödel's two incompleteness theorems are among the most important results in modern logic, and have deep implications for various issues. They concern the limits of provability in formal axiomatic theories. The first incompleteness theorem states that in any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of arithmetic can be carried out, there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F. According to the second incompleteness theorem, such a formal…Read more
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Hilbert's Program RevisitedSynthese 137 (1-2): 157-177. 2003.
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Causation, exclusion, and the special sciencesErkenntnis 73 (3): 349-363. 2010.
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Ramsification and inductive inferenceSynthese 187 (2): 569-577. 2012.
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Realism: Metaphysical, Scientific, and SemanticIn Kenneth R. Westphal (ed.), Realism, Science, and Pragmatism, Routledge. pp. 139-158. 2014.Three influential forms of realism are distinguished and interrelated: realism about the external world, construed as a metaphysical doctrine; scientific realism about non-observable entities postulated in science; and semantic realism as defined by Dummett. Metaphysical realism about everyday physical objects is contrasted with idealism and phenomenalism, and several potent arguments against these latter views are reviewed. Three forms of scientific realism are then distinguished: (i) scientif…Read more
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Chalmers' Blueprint of the WorldInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (1): 113-128. 2014.
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Neo-Logicism and Its LogicHistory and Philosophy of Logic 41 (1): 82-95. 2020.The rather unrestrained use of second-order logic in the neo-logicist program is critically examined. It is argued in some detail that it brings with it genuine set-theoretical existence assumptions and that the mathematical power that Hume’s Principle seems to provide, in the derivation of Frege’s Theorem, comes largely from the ‘logic’ assumed rather than from Hume’s Principle. It is shown that Hume’s Principle is in reality not stronger than the very weak Robinson Arithmetic Q. Consequently, …Read more
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Theories of Reference: What Was the Question?In Andrea Bianchi (ed.), Language and reality from a naturalistic perspective: Themes from Michael Devitt, Springer. 2020.The new theory of reference has won popularity. However, a number of noted philosophers have also attempted to reply to the critical arguments of Kripke and others, and aimed to vindicate the description theory of reference. Such responses are often based on ingenious novel kinds of descriptions, such as rigidified descriptions, causal descriptions, and metalinguistic descriptions. This prolonged debate raises the doubt whether different parties really have any shared understanding of what the c…Read more
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Tampere UniversityRegular Faculty
University of Helsinki
PhD, 1998
Tampere, Western Finland, Finland
Areas of Interest
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