A Bundle Theory of Words

It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics

Quine, Ontology, and Physicalism

Quine's views on ontology and naturalism are well-known but rarely considered in tandem. According to my interpretation the connection between them is vital. I read Quine as a global epistemic structuralist. Quine thought we only ever know objects qua solutions to puzzles about significant intersections in observations. Objects are always accessed descriptively, via their roles in our best theory. Quine's Kant lectures contain an early version of epistemic structuralism with uncharacteristic remarks about the mental. Here Quine embraces mitigated anomalous monism, allowing introspection and the availability in principle of full physical descriptions of the perceptual states which get science off the ground. Later versions abandon these ideas. My epistemic-structural interpretation explains why. I argue first-personal introspective access to mental states is incompatible with global epistemic structuralism

Merits of Leśniewski type nominalism

For the sake of explaining the merits of a Leśniewski type nominalism, it should be made clear what is meant by „nominalism” and what the characteristics of this special type of nominalism are. To the first question we can find quite a lot of mutually inconsistent answers. Therefore I will just explain the distinction between two different nominalistic traditions which I hold to be fundamental. I think we should not just focus on the question which so-called abstract entities are rejected but as well look for basic entities nominalists rely on

Logical consequence for nominalists

It is often claimed that nominalistic programmes to reconstruct mathematics fail, since they will at some point involve the notion of logical consequence which is unavailable to the nominalist. In this paper we use an idea of Goodman and Quine to develop a nominalistically acceptable explication of logical consequence

Nelson Goodman’s general theory of symbols: can it help characterise some educational concerns?

Nelson Goodman was active between 1941 and the end of the century. From 1968 he was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He died in 1998 at the age of 92 having made contributions in the field of logic and analytical philosophy. His unremitting nominalism led to a radical constructivist or irrealist position. He was a constructivist not only in the sense of acknowledging the constitutive nature of our classifications of things, ultimately amounting to versions of the world, but also in the way that, following Carnap, he saw it as part of the responsibility of philosophy to construct robust and consistent systems of statements that serve as correctives to the logical disarray of natural language. He also took to its logical conclusions another of Carnap’s principles namely that the truth of a statement is dependent on a particular frame of reference... In this paper I consider how Goodman's analysis of the forms of reference might fruitfully be applied to some educational concerns. He identifies two main species of reference, denotation and exemplification, and two main sub-species, representation and expression. Symbols may be labels or samples. I first present his theory of notation and then the operation of labels and samples in turn and consider how we might use them to describe teaching and learning. I further apply them to explain the role that experience plays in a teacher’s professional development and how they might help to characterise the personal dimension of teaching. I then present his theory of metaphor and expression and finally suggest ways in which these and his other concepts may help theorise parental choice of school as part of a re-conceptualised theory of social practice

Willard Van Orman Quine's Philosophical Development in the 1930s and 1940s

As analytic philosophy is becoming increasingly aware of and interested in its own history, the study of that field is broadening to include, not just its earliest beginnings, but also the mid-twentieth century. One of the towering figures of this epoch is W.V. Quine (1908-2000), champion of naturalism in philosophy of science, pioneer of mathematical logic, trying to unite an austerely physicalist theory of the world with the truths of mathematics, psychology, and linguistics. Quine's posthumous papers, notes, and drafts revealing the development of his views in the forties have recently begun to be published, as well as careful philosophical studies of, for instance, the evolution of his key doctrine that mathematical and logical truth are continuous with, not divorced from, the truths of natural science. But one central text has remained unexplored: Quine's Portuguese-language book on logic, his 'farewell for now' to the discipline as he embarked on an assignment in the Navy in WWII. Anglophone philosophers have neglected this book because they could not read it. Jointly with colleagues, I have completed the first full English translation of this book. In this accompanying paper I draw out the main philosophical contributions Quine made in the book, placing them in their historical context and relating them to Quine's overall philosophical development during the period. Besides significant developments in the evolution of Quine's views on meaning and analyticity, I argue, this book is also driven by Quine's indebtedness to Russell and Whitehead, Tarski, and Frege, and contains crucial developments in his thinking on philosophy of logic and ontology. This includes early versions of some arguments from 'On What There Is', four-dimensionalism, and virtual set theory

Ten Misconceptions from the History of Analysis and Their Debunking

The widespread idea that infinitesimals were "eliminated" by the "great triumvirate" of Cantor, Dedekind, and Weierstrass is refuted by an uninterrupted chain of work on infinitesimal-enriched number systems. The elimination claim is an oversimplification created by triumvirate followers, who tend to view the history of analysis as a pre-ordained march toward the radiant future of Weierstrassian epsilontics. In the present text, we document distortions of the history of analysis stemming from the triumvirate ideology of ontological minimalism, which identified the continuum with a single number system. Such anachronistic distortions characterize the received interpretation of Stevin, Leibniz, d'Alembert, Cauchy, and others.Comment: 46 pages, 4 figures; Foundations of Science (2012). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1108.2885 and arXiv:1110.545

Construction and cognition

The Structure of Appearance presents a phenomenalist system which constructs enduring visible objects out of qualia. Nevertheless Goodman does not espouse phenomenalism. Why not? In answering this question this paper explicates Goodman's views about the nature and functions of constructional systems, the prospects of reductionism, and the character of epistemology