Abstract Based on a reconstruction of the development Rudolf Carnap’s views from Aufbau until 1960s, this paper provides an account philosopher’s understanding non-cognitivism, which is here seen as in line with so-called scientific world-conception left-wing logical empiricism. The starting point conception claim that every human decision depends certain attitudes cannot be justified at cognit...

One of the most remarkable products of the reaction against Aristotelian philosophy, in the form that was handed down by late Mediaeval philosophers, was the rise of an entirely new philosophical system which came to be called ’Empiricism”. This was particularly associated with British philosophers, and was both instrumental in the rise of modern science, and a by-product of it. Its first major...

It is often assumed that there is a close connection between Quine’s criticism of the analytic/synthetic distinction, in ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’ and onwards, and his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, in Word and Object and onwards. Sometimes this is just assumed, since both are criticisms of traditional or naive concepts of linguistic meaning. Sometimes there is an argument to supp...

The thesis that I want to examine today is this: arithmetical knowledge may be legitimately extended by confirmation just as it may be by proof. This thesis is one component of a broader empirical account of arithmetical knowledge, according to which: subsequent to some appropriately empirical acquisition of knowledge of quantifier-free truths like 7 + 5 = 12, one may legitimately extend this k...

What aspects of knowledge emerge in children prior to their first contacts with the objects of their knowledge, and what aspects emerge through the shaping effects of experience with those objects? What aspects of knowledge are constant over human development from the moment that infants begin to make sense of the world, and what aspects change as children grow and learn? What aspects of knowle...