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Author: Eric Funkhouser Publisher: ISBN: 0198713304 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Eric Funkhouser uncovers a logical structure that is common to many, if not all, classificatory systems or taxonomies. Every conceptual scheme--including the sciences, mathematics, and ethics--classifies things into kinds. Given their ubiquity across theoretical contexts, we would benefit from understanding the nature of such kinds. Significantly, most conceptual schemes posit kinds that vary in their degree of specificity. Species-genus taxonomiesprovide us with familiar examples, with the species classification being more specific than the genus classification. This book instead focuses on adjectival kinds--classifications picked out by kind-terms like'mass', 'shape', or 'belief', to give but a few examples. One of its fundamental claims is that studying the determination relation provides deep insight into the essences of adjectival kinds and their instances (properties). The determination relation is found to contain two components, which are employed to structure kinds at the same level of abstraction into property spaces. In turn, these property space models lead to a theory for individuating properties, which has profound consequenceswhen it comes to reduction, autonomy, and causation. Funkhouser argues that determination and realization are mutually exclusive relations. He defends the claim that multiple realizability entailsvarious senses of autonomy from various reductionist challenges. These theories of determination and realization ultimately provide general standards for establishing the autonomy of the special sciences or, conversely, their reduction.
Author: Eric Funkhouser Publisher: ISBN: 0198713304 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Eric Funkhouser uncovers a logical structure that is common to many, if not all, classificatory systems or taxonomies. Every conceptual scheme--including the sciences, mathematics, and ethics--classifies things into kinds. Given their ubiquity across theoretical contexts, we would benefit from understanding the nature of such kinds. Significantly, most conceptual schemes posit kinds that vary in their degree of specificity. Species-genus taxonomiesprovide us with familiar examples, with the species classification being more specific than the genus classification. This book instead focuses on adjectival kinds--classifications picked out by kind-terms like'mass', 'shape', or 'belief', to give but a few examples. One of its fundamental claims is that studying the determination relation provides deep insight into the essences of adjectival kinds and their instances (properties). The determination relation is found to contain two components, which are employed to structure kinds at the same level of abstraction into property spaces. In turn, these property space models lead to a theory for individuating properties, which has profound consequenceswhen it comes to reduction, autonomy, and causation. Funkhouser argues that determination and realization are mutually exclusive relations. He defends the claim that multiple realizability entailsvarious senses of autonomy from various reductionist challenges. These theories of determination and realization ultimately provide general standards for establishing the autonomy of the special sciences or, conversely, their reduction.
Author: Eric Funkhouser Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191053287 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
Eric Funkhouser uncovers a logical structure that is common to many, if not all, classificatory systems or taxonomies. Every conceptual scheme—including the sciences, mathematics, and ethics—classifies things into kinds. Given their ubiquity across theoretical contexts, we would benefit from understanding the nature of such kinds. Significantly, most conceptual schemes posit kinds that vary in their degree of specificity. Species-genus taxonomies provide us with familiar examples, with the species classification being more specific than the genus classification. This book instead focuses on adjectival kinds—classifications picked out by kind-terms like 'mass', 'shape', or 'belief', to give but a few examples. Some adjectival kinds specify others—for example, scarlet is a specific kind of red. This is an instance of the determinate-determinable relation. One of the fundamental claims of this book is that studying the determination relation provides deep insight into the essences of adjectival kinds and their instances (properties). The determination relation is found to contain two components, which are employed to structure kinds at the same level of abstraction into property spaces. In turn, these property space models lead to a theory for individuating properties, which has profound consequences when it comes to reduction, autonomy, and causation. Determination relations are contrasted with realization relations, the latter being the favored way of understanding how the mental and the physical are related. Particular attention is given to the distinction between multiple realizability and multiple determination, and it is argued that determination and realization are mutually exclusive relations. This has been overlooked in many discussions of multiple realizability, but it is central to maintaining the connection between multiple realizability and autonomy. The claim that multiple realizability entails various senses of autonomy is defended from various reductionist challenges. These theories of determination and realization ultimately provide general standards for establishing the autonomy of the special sciences or, conversely, their reduction.
Author: Rudolf Carnap Publisher: Open Court Publishing ISBN: 9780812695236 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
Available for the first time in 20 years, here are two important works from the 1920s by the best-known representative of the Vienna Circle. In The Logical Structure of the World, Carnap adopts the position of "methodological solipsism" and shows that it is possible to describe the world from the immediate data of experience. In his Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, he asserts that many philosophical problems are meaningless.
Author: Joseph D. Sneed Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9401030669 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 325
Book Description
This book is about scientific theories of a particular kind - theories of mathematical physics. Examples of such theories are classical and relativis tic particle mechanics, classical electrodynamics, classical thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, hydrodynamics, and quantum mechanics. Roughly, these are theories in which a certain mathematical structure is employed to make statements about some fragment of the world. Most of the book is simply an elaboration of this rough characterization of theories of mathematical physics. It is argued that each theory of mathematical physics has associated with it a certain characteristic mathematical struc ture. This structure may be used in a variety of ways to make empirical claims about putative applications of the theory. Typically - though not necessarily - the way this structure is used in making such claims requires that certain elements in the structure play essentially different roles. Some playa "theoretical" role; others playa "non-theoretical" role. For example, in classical particle mechanics, mass and force playa theoretical role while position plays a non-theoretical role. Some attention is given to showing how this distinction can be drawn and describing precisely the way in which the theoretical and non-theoretical elements function in the claims of the theory. An attempt is made to say, rather precisely, what a theory of mathematical physics is and how you tell one such theory from anothe- what the identity conditions for these theories are.
Author: A. Cornelius Benjamin Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000735494 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
This book addresses the argument in the history of the philosophy of science between the positivists and the anti-positivists. The author starts from a point of firm conviction that all science and philosophy must start with the given... But that the range of the given is not definite. He begins with an examination of science from the outside and then the inside, explaining his position on metaphysics and attempts to formulate the character of operational acts before a general theory of symbolism is explored. The last five chapters constitute a treatise to show that the development from one stage of symbolismto the next is inevitable, consequently that explanatory science represents the culmination of knowledge.
Author: Eric Funkhouser Publisher: ISBN: 9780191781681 Category : Classification Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
Eric Funkhouser uncovers a logical structure that is common to many, if not all, classificatory systems, given by the determination dimensions of kinds. His account of multiple realisability provides standards for establishing the autonomy of the sciences.
Author: Robert May Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262631020 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
This study focuses on the relation of syntactic and semantic structure. It investigates the notion that within generative grammar there is a level of linguistic representation Logical Form. Its main assumption is that this is a level of phrase structure representation, derived by transformational operations from S-structure, and over which formal semantic interpretations are defined.The book explores Logical Form by focusing primarily on quantificational phenomena and on how their explicit syntactic representation interacts with various syntactic and semantic properties. Among the topics discussed are the interactions of wh and quantified phrases, bound variable anaphora, branching quantifiers, extraposition and multiple interrogation.Logical Form contains several technical innovations: the notion that LF-movement closely approximates "Move α," a new approach to characterizing quantifier scope, which makes central use of the notion of "government," a novel interpretation of the relation of syntactic nodes and categorical projections, and an application of path theory to the syntactic structure of Logical Form.Robert May is Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Barnard College, Columbia University. Logical Form is Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 12.
Author: Kevin L. Flannery Publisher: CUA Press ISBN: 9780813209883 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
"Although most natural law ethical theories recognize moral absolutes, there is not much agreement even among natural law theorists about how to identify them. The author argues that in order to understand and determine the morality (or immorality) of a human action, it must be considered in relation to the organized system of human practices within which it is performed. Such an approach, he argues, is to be found in the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas, especially once it is recognized that the logical structure of Aquinas's ethical theory is basically that of an Aristotelian science." "The book will be useful to students and scholars interested in ethics, especially from an Aristotelian and/or Thomistic perspective. One appendix reproduces the Leonine text of the De malo (question 6), with facing English translation. Another appendix provides facing Latin text and English translation of the Summa Theologiae I-II (question 94, article 2)."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Eric Funkhouser
Author: Eric Funkhouser
Author: Eric Funkhouser
Author: Rudolf Carnap
Author: Joseph D. Sneed
Author: A. Cornelius Benjamin
Author: Eric Funkhouser
Author: Robert May
Author: E. J. Lowe
Author: Kevin L. Flannery
Author: A. A. Rini