Jay F. Rosenberg

Explanation and Truth

In the preceding chapter, I isolated certain conceptual features of the process of theory succession in the physical sciences. I argued there that the key to understanding the relationship between a predecessor theory and its successor lay in the notion of explanation, for the critical test of a successor theory lay in its explanatory strength. In particular, I argued, there is a constraint on any proposed successor theory for a range of phenomena: that its adoption put us in the position of being able to offer explanatory accounts both of the descriptive successes and of some of the descriptive failures (limit conditions) of its predecessor(s). Once this was seen, it became clear, too, that prediction was methodologically ancillary, serving the function of mapping the explanatory boundaries of a pair of theories and thereby establishing the actual empirical situation to answer to the successor, rather than to the predecessor, descriptions. Thus we could account for the fact that a select handful of predictions can do the total confirmatory job.

Russell on Negative Facts

Throughout his atomistic period, and for a surprising number of years afterwards (see, e.g., HKSL, 121 ff.), Russell struggled with the problems of negation. In spite of near riots and almost unquenchable desires, he found himself unable, during the atomistic years, to avoid the positing of negative facts. The matter still needs some looking into. I propose, in this paper, to look into it. As usual in such discussions, we will need some ontological ground-rules. Mine will be liberal. I shall, for example, mirror

Review Essay: Raiders of the Lost Distinction: Richard Rorty and the Search for the Last Dichotomy@@@Contigency, Irony, and Solidarity.@@@Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth.@@@Essays on Heidegger and Others.@@@Reading Rorty.

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (CIS), (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. xvi, 201. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, (ORT), Philosophical Papers Volume 1, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. x, 226. , Essays on Heidegger and Others, (EHO), Philosophical Papers Volume 2, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. x, 202. Alan R. Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty, (RR), (Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. xiv, 384.

Rules and Regularities Revisited

Setting out to write this essay, I found myself thinking back to an occasion in the early 1970’s when Paul Ziff and I debated the question “Are there rules of language?” before the Philological Club here at the University of North Carolina. I, then a fairly recently minted young Assistant Professor with more energy and enthusiasm than good sense, took the affirmative. Paul, who had recently joined our department as a William Rand Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, took the negative. Since he was already on record in Semantic Analysis 1 as holding that Rules have virtually nothing to do with speaking or understanding a natural language.... An appeal to rules in the course of discussing the regularities to be found in a natural language is as irrelevant as an appeal to the laws of Massachusetts while discussing the laws of motion. (SA, 34) this was not surprising.

Castañeda’s Ontology

The history of philosophy can be divided in many ways. One illuminating story sees that history as a series of dialectical ‘turns’ — the ‘ontological turn’ institutionalized by Plato, the ‘theological turn’ inaugurated by the Mediaeval Christian rediscovery of Aristotle, the ‘epistemological turn—’ initated by Descartes, and the ‘logico-linguistic’ turn executed at the beginning of this century by Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Russell. What is, perhaps, a more fundamental story, however, sees even these dialectical turns as mere moments in the interweaving flow of two great streams — the first springing from the wellhead of Plato, the second from Aristotle.

Translation and Theories

I remarked in Chapter I that the fact of a multiplicity of languages raises the question of the extent to which languages are effectively intertranslatable. Since some philosophers, notably Quine, have argued for severe limitations in principle on the enterprise of translation, I concluded that an adequate theory of linguistic representation needed to address itself to the question of the limits of interlinguistic translation. I shall begin this chapter with an investigation of that question and, in particular, of Quine’s arguments.

Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy of mind

Nowhere within philosophy is it more difficult to draw lines of demarcation than in an attempt to isolate the philosophy of mind as a coherent subregion of the total philosophical terrain. The philosophy of mind grades off smoothly into questions of epistemology (the structure of sensory awareness and perceptual cognition), of ontology (the nature and multiplicity of substances), of the theory of action, of the philosophy of language and representation, of moral and social and political philosophy, and nowadays even into questions centered in the philosophy of science, in the theory of theories. In the case of Wilfrid Sellars, these difficulties are especially acute, for Sellars’ philosophy of mind is intricately and inextricably woven into the fabric of a systematic philosophical vision of classical scope.

Time and the Self: The Limits of Idealist Consciousness

Who, then, are we? Part of the answer has already been given in the course of the last chapter. We are, at least, temporally discursive intelligences. The characterization has three parts. Separately and conjointly, these parts all have consequences.1

Things: The Micro-Ontology of Realist Consciousness

Where there is a thing, there is also what is not that thing. A thing is distinguished from, and contrasts with, its environment. There must, consequently, always be something in which a thing and its environment differ. I shall call it their contents. Where thing meets environment, there is a boundary. A boundary is a difference in content. How a thing is bounded in its environment I shall call its form. The content of a thing is what it is made of or consists of. Its form is how that content is arranged in the environment. A thing, then, is form plus content. It is so-much thus-arranged (form) such- and-such stuff (content).

Correctness and Community: From the Individual to the Social

We now have half of our answer to the Cartesian skeptic. What we wanted, recall, were considerations which implied that our representings, our ways of thinking about the world, are not arbitrary but determinate, and, indeed, are so determined as to ensure some connection between our having a particular world-picture and its being a correct world-picture. Determinateness we now have. Our way of thinking about the world must be the realist’s way. Our representations must be subject to the constraints of a Realist Core. We must represent (at least some) things as existing independently of our encountering them, as having a being which does not consist in their being represented. That is, we must be, as I shall put it, Constitutive Realists.