OBSERVATIONS ON EMPIRICISM.

Discussion—Soames on empiricism

nothing so much as Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov. Both are works that arose immediately out of the needs of undergraduate teaching, yet each manages to say much of significance to knowledgeable professionals. Each indirectly provides an outline of the history of its field, through a presentation of selected major works, taken in chronological order and including items that are gene...

Commentary on Huovinen’s “Varieties of Musicological Empiricism”

Erkki Huovinen’s “Varieties of Musicological Empiricism” provides a valuable analysis of some of the theoretical predicaments raised by pursuing an empirical musicology. But in this commentary, I argue for a less programmatic, and more pragmatic, approach to the term than he does. Empirical approaches in musicology have been around in one form or another for a long time, and the purpose of the ...

Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology

Empiricists are in general rather suspicious with respect to any kind of abstract entities like properties, classes, relations, numbers, propositions, etc. They usually feel much more in sympathy with nominalists than with realists (in the medieval sense). As far as possible they try to avoid any reference to abstract entities and to restrict themselves to what is sometimes called a nominalisti...

Some Realism About Empiricism

Intentionality Versus Constructive Empiricism

By focussing on the intentional character of observation in science, we argue that Constructive Empiricism—B.C. van Fraassen’s much debated and explored view of science—is inconsistent. We then argue there are at least two ways out of our Inconsistency Argument, one of which is more easily to square with Constructive Empiricism than the other. 1 The Inconsistency Argument We shall argue that th...