§0. AlonzoChurch’s contributions to philosophy and to thatmost philosophical part of logic, intensional logic, are impressive indeed. He wrote relatively few papers actually devoted to specifically philosophical issues, as distinguished from related technical work in logic. Many of his contributions appear in reviews for The Journal of Symbolic Logic, and it can hardly be maintained that one fi...

The growing literature on philosophical thought experiments has so far focused almost exclusively on the role of thought experiments in confirming or refuting philosophical hypotheses or theories. In this paper we draw attention to an additional and largely ignored role that thought experiments frequently play in our philosophical practice: some thought experiments do not merely serve as means ...

In this paper I first point out the pluralist constitution of science in general and of chemistry in particular and then argue that it is inevitable for epistemological reasons. Once methodological pluralism is accepted, many mainstream philosophical debates that are based on methodological monism become futile, of which I discuss “laws of nature”, “reductionism”, and “scientific realism”. That...

‘‘I’d really like to do a survey’’ or ‘‘Let’s conduct some interviews’’ might sound like reasonable starting points for a research project. However, it is crucial that researchers examine their philosophical assumptions and those underpinning their research questions before selecting data collection methods. Philosophical assumptions relate to ontology, or the nature of reality, and epistemolog...

Purpose – This philosophical essay aims to explore the concept of information science. Design/methodology/approach – The philosophical argumentation is composed of five phases. It is based on clarifying the meanings of its basic concept “data”, “information” and “knowledge”. Findings – The study suggests that the name of the field “information science” should be changed to “knowledge science”. ...

In an interesting and provocative article, Michael Lewis-Beck and Andrew Skalaban make an important contribution by emphasizing several philosophical issues in political methodology that have received too little attention from methodologists and quantitative researchers. These issues involve the role of systematic, and especially stochastic, variation in statistical models. After briefly discus...

The philosophical relevance of experimental psychology is hard to dispute. Much more controversial is the so-called negative program’s critique of armchair philosophical methodology, in particular the reliance on ‘intuitions’ about thought experiments. This chapter responds to that critique. It argues that, since the negative program has been forced to extend the category of intuition to ordina...

Business-IT alignment is complicated because of the need to align multiple business and IT points of view. A philosophical foundation can help generate methods that bring together these disparate viewpoints in a common model that all stakeholders can agree upon. In this paper, we describe the philosophical foundations of the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Methodology (SEAM) and show how it ca...