1,999 research outputs found
A New Peircean Response to Radical Skepticism
The radical skeptic argues that I have no knowledge of things I ordinarily claim to know because I have no evidence for or against the possibility of being systematically fed illusions. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in pragmatic responses to skepticism inspired by C. S. Peirce. This essay challenges one such influential response and presents a better Peircean way to refute the skeptic. The account I develop holds that although I do not know whether the skeptical hypothesis is true, I still know things I ordinarily claim to know. Although it will emerge that this reply appears similar to a classic contextualist response to radical skepticism, it avoids two central problems facing that response
Teaching Peirce to Undergraduates
Fourteen philosophers share their experience teaching Peirce to undergraduates in a
variety of settings and a variety of courses. The latter include introductory philosophy
courses as well as upper-level courses in American philosophy, philosophy of religion,
logic, philosophy of science, medieval philosophy, semiotics, metaphysics, etc., and even an upper-level course devoted entirely to Peirce. The project originates in a session devoted to teaching Peirce held at the 2007 annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. The session, organized by James Campbell and Richard Hart, was co-sponsored by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers
Letting reality bite
Describes an experiment in teaching undergraduate epistemology, guided by Peirce’s pragmatic maxim
Building castles in Spain: Peirce’s idea of scientific inquiry and its applications to the Social Sciences and to Ethics
Several recent publications attest to a renewed interest, at the dawn of the 21st century, in the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. While agreeing with the relevance of Peirce philosophy for the 21st century, we disagree with some interpretations of Peirce as a utilitarian-based pragmatist, or with attempts to extract from Peirce a theory of social justice for 21st century societies. A critical exploration of Peirce’s philosophy of science, particularly his idea of scientific inquiry as “the study of useless things”, serves to illuminate the un-pragmatic and anti-utilitarian dimension of Peirce’s thought, as well as to reveal his true ethical relevance for the 21st century
This is simply what I do: Peirce's real generality meets Wittgenstein's rule-following?
Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following is widely regarded to have identified what Kripke called “the most radical and original sceptical problem that philosophy has seen to date”. But does it? This paper examines the problem in the light of Charles Peirce’s distinctive scientific hierarchy. Peirce identifies a phenomenological inquiry which is prior to both logic and metaphysics, whose role is to identify the most fundamental philosophical categories. His third category, particularly salient in this context, pertains to general predication.
Rule-following scepticism, the paper suggests, results from running together two questions: “How is it that I can project rules?”, and, “What is it for a given usage of a rule to be right?”. In Peircean terms the former question, concerning the irreducibility of general predication (to singular reference), must be answered in phenomenology, while the latter, concerning the difference between true and false predication, is answered in logic. A failure to appreciate this distinction, it is argued, has led philosophers to focus exclusively on Wittgenstein’s famous public account of rule-following rightness, thus overlooking a private, phenomenological dimension to Wittgenstein’s remarks on following a rule which gives the lie to Kripke’s reading of him as a sceptic
Algebraic foundations for qualitative calculi and networks
A qualitative representation is like an ordinary representation of a
relation algebra, but instead of requiring , as
we do for ordinary representations, we only require that , for each in the algebra. A constraint
network is qualitatively satisfiable if its nodes can be mapped to elements of
a qualitative representation, preserving the constraints. If a constraint
network is satisfiable then it is clearly qualitatively satisfiable, but the
converse can fail. However, for a wide range of relation algebras including the
point algebra, the Allen Interval Algebra, RCC8 and many others, a network is
satisfiable if and only if it is qualitatively satisfiable.
Unlike ordinary composition, the weak composition arising from qualitative
representations need not be associative, so we can generalise by considering
network satisfaction problems over non-associative algebras. We prove that
computationally, qualitative representations have many advantages over ordinary
representations: whereas many finite relation algebras have only infinite
representations, every finite qualitatively representable algebra has a finite
qualitative representation; the representability problem for (the atom
structures of) finite non-associative algebras is NP-complete; the network
satisfaction problem over a finite qualitatively representable algebra is
always in NP; the validity of equations over qualitative representations is
co-NP-complete. On the other hand we prove that there is no finite
axiomatisation of the class of qualitatively representable algebras.Comment: 22 page
Saving Pragmatist Democratic Theory (from Itself)
Deweyan democracy is inherently comprehensive in the Rawlsian sense and therefore
unable to countenance the fact of reasonable pluralism. This renders Deweyan democracy
nonviable on pragmatic grounds. Given the Deweyan pragmatists’ views about the proper
relation between philosophy and politics, unless there is a viable pragmatist alternative to
Deweyan democracy, pragmatism itself is jeopardized. I develop a pragmatist alternative
to Deweyan democracy rooted in a Peircean social epistemology. Peircean democracy can
give Deweyan pragmatists all they should want from a democratic theory while avoiding
the anti-pluralistic implications of Dewey’s own democratic theory. After presenting the
arguments against Deweyan democracy and for Peircean democracy, I address a criticism
of Peircean democracy recently posed by Matthew Festenstein
Phonaesthetic Phonological Iconicity in Literary Analysis Illustrated by Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”
The article offers a phonosemantic analysis of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” The
phonosemantic investigation has been based on the corpus of nineteen relevant sound-related
descriptions of the sea. Although most excerpts identified contain aural metaphors and are
not phonologically iconic per se, there seem to exist at least three fragments which are
particularly interesting from a phonosemantic point of view. Most notably, phonaesthemes
/gl/, /l/, /r/ have been found to carry substantial meaning contributing to the overall
interpretation of the story in question. Accounting for the inevitable subjectivity concerning
iconicity, and in this case phonological iconicity, a few theories are presented in order to
support the author’s reading of each phonaestheme’s contextual significance. The paper
briefly reviews the chronological development of the field of phonosemantics and then
combines the aural images theory (proposed by Richard Rhodes) with the “aural semiotic
process” theory (the term coined by the author). Each analysis is further supplemented with
scholarly views on respective phonaesthemes. On the whole, the paper does not aim to
polemicize with the well-established definition of a phoneme and its generally accepted
arbitrariness. Nevertheless, it has been observed that a speculative phonosemantic analysis of
a literary work may yield noteworthy results
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