Abstract Contentions about the origin of early modern empiricism have been floating at least since 1980s, where its exclusive “Britishness” was initially question, and name Gassendi provocatively put forward as putative “founder” current to detriment Francis Bacon. Recent scholarship has shown that did not derive from philosophical speculation exclusively but had multiple sources “foundations.”...

Abstract Many have taken Sellars’s critique of empiricism in “Empiricism and the Philosophy Mind” ( EPM ) to be aimed at his teacher C. I. Lewis. But if so, why do famous arguments its opening sections carry so little force against Lewis’s views? Understandably, some respond by denying that epistemology is among positions targeted Sellars. this incorrect. Indeed, Sellars had earlier offered mor...

Perhaps the most famous attack on Carnap’s logical empiricism is W.V. Quine’s article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. In the article, Quine argues against the analytic/synthetic distinction that Carnap employs, as well as against his sometime verificationism. The article is widely regarded as much more than an attack on logical empiricism, however. It is often seen as the most important critique of...

In this paper I argue—against van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism—that the practice of saving phenomena is much broader than usually thought, and includes unobservable phenomena as well as observable ones. My argument turns on the distinction between data and phenomena: I discuss how unobservable phenomena manifest themselves in data models and how theoretical models able to save them are ch...

Where have we been and where are we going? Three types of answers will be discussed: consistent progress, oscillations and discontinuities. Moore’s Law provides a convincing demonstration of consistent progress, when it applies. Speech recognition error rates are declining by 10× per decade; speech coding rates are declining by 2× per decade. Unfortunately, fields do not always move in consiste...

This paper lays out the components of a language acquisition model, the interconnections among the components, and the differing stances of nativism and empiricism about syntax. After demonstrating that parsimony cannot decide between the two stances, the paper analyzes nine examples of evidence that have been used to argue for or against nativism, concluding that most pieces of evidence are ei...

Many who take a dismissive attitude towards metaphysics trace their view back to Carnap’s ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ (1950a). But the reason Carnap takes a dismissive attitude to metaphysics is a matter of controversy. I will argue that no reason is given in ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’, and this is because his reason for rejecting metaphysical debates was given in ‘Pseudo-Pro...

In recent years, Hjørland has developed a typology of basic epistemological approaches to KO that identifies four basic positions—empiricism, rationalism, historicism/hermeneutics, and pragmatism—with which to characterize the epistemological bases and methodological orientation of KOSs. Although scholars of KO have noted that the design of a single KOS may incorporate epistemological-methodolo...

Joseph Rouse Wesleyan University The opening sentence of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is often thought to be prophetic. Kuhn proclaimed that “history of science ... could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed” (1970, p. 1). In the decade or so after the book was published in 1962, the dominant philosophical conception of science, logi...

The recent series of mass cetacean strandings in the stranding-prone regions of Australia and New Zealand (BBC News 2004) and the ensuing speculation regarding their cause demonstrate that debates surrounding this phenomenon continue to be of issue. As most interested in these debates are aware, hypotheses addressing their causes range from the more biologically plausible— including climate and...