Сборник ведущих социологов и социальных теоретиков из США и Западной Европы, представляющих новую практическую парадигму, своего рода коллективный манифест прагматического поворота. Авторы позиционируют практическую парадигму относительно структурализма, герменевтики, семиотики. В книге обсуждается природа практического и неявного знания, навыков и практик, которые составляют фон социального порядка и поддерживают общую для любого коллектива систему смыслов.

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The method of truth in metaphysics

The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory

Preface. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. The Linguistic Turn and the Conceptual Turn. 2. Taking Philosophical Questions at Face Value. 3. Metaphysical Conceptions of Analyticity. 4. Epistemological Conceptions of Analyticity. 5. Knowledge of Metaphysical Modality. 6. Thought Experiments. 7. Evidence in Philosophy. 8. Knowledge Maximization. Afterword. Must Do Better. Appendix 1. Modal Logic within Counterfactual Logic. Appendix 2. Counterfactual Donkeys. Bibliography. Index

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The Philosophy of Philosophy

In the first of this series of articles Jerry Fodor set the scene for his discussion of mental representation: "It rained for weeks and we were all so tired of ontology, but there didn't seem to be much else to do" (1985, p. 76). Ignoring ontology in favour of the supposedly more exciting game of mental representations may be justified by the now necessary division of philosophical labour. But let us not forget that any philosophy of mind will presuppose an ontological inventory. It is often simply assumed, for example, that there are mental properties. Assume if you like, but do not pretend that there is no metaphysical work to be done explaining what these properties are and what role they play. This article says something about the state of the art in work on the metaphysics of properties. "State of the art" suggests an accepted list of methods by which one obtains results and an accepted list of results obtained, or, failing this, an accepted list of questions which ought to be answered by some method or other. Philosophy being what it is, I can find no consensus in this area of metaphysics. This absence of fixed points has two connected sources. Although philosophy advertises itself as the reflective discipline par excellence, it is a familiar fact that philosophers lose themselves in projects for which they can provide no reflective description or justification. In the absence of such common reflection the lack of consensus is no surprise. But even when the focus is changed from the nitty-gritty of working out the details of a particular theory to critical reflection on the aims and methods of the theory and back again, there is no unique route which this interplay takes. Metaphysics has survived numerous attempted assassinations. Hume's call for the burning of the books has not been heeded except by his distant descendants, the logical positivists, whose theatrical derision of metaphysics raised a few cheap laughs. Now the show is over and serious metaphysics flourishes once more. But it has not survived unscathed. There are urgent, unanswered questions about its methods of inquiry. In this article I shall try to impose some order on some debates that are currently live within the metaphysics of properties. Along the way I point

The Metaphysics of Properties

There is the following predicament. One, we find ourselves uttering sentences that seem on the face of it to be committed to so-and-so's – sentences that could not be true unless so-and-so's existed. But, two, we do not believe that so-and-so's exist. 1 What is someone caught up in The Predicament (as let's call it) supposed to do? The official standard menu of options was given by Quine in Word and Object. Our choices are three: (1) show how the commitment can be paraphrased away – thus Quine himself on chances. (2) stop uttering the problematic sentences – thus Quine on glints. (3) give up one's resistance to the commitment -thus Quine on sets. Those who reject these options are subjected by Quine to some pretty withering criticism: "I deplore the philosophical double talk, which would repudiate an ontology while simultaneously enjoying its benefits" (242).

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Go Figure: A Path through Fictionalism

Aristotle thought man was a rational animal. From his time to ours, however, there has been a steady stream of writers who have dissented from this sanguine assessment. For Bacon, Hume, Freud, or D. H. Lawrence, rationality is at best a sometimes thing. On their view, episodes of rational inference and action are scattered beacons on the irrational coastline of human history. During the last decade or so, these impressionistic chroniclers of man's cognitive foibles have been joined by a growing group of experimental psychologists who are subjecting human reasoning to careful empirical scrutiny. Much of what they have found would appall Aristotle. Human subjects, it would appear, regularly and systematically invoke inferential and judgmental strate gies ranging from the merely invalid to the genuinely bizarre. Recently, however, there have been rumblings of a reaction brewing a resurgence of Aristotelian optimism. Those defending the sullied name of human reason have been philosophers, and their weapons have been conceptual analysis and epistemological argument. The central thrust of their defense is the claim that empirical evidence could not possibly support the conclusion that people are systematically irra tional. And thus the experiments which allegedly show that they are must be either flawed or misinterpreted. In this paper I propose to take a critical look at these philosophical defenses of rationality. My sympathies, I should note straightaway, are squarely with the psychologists. My central thesis is that the philoso phical arguments aimed at showing irrationality cannot be experiment ally demonstrated are mistaken. Before considering these arguments, however, we would do well to set out a few illustrations of the sort of empirical studies which allegedly show that people depart from nor mative standards of rationality in systematic ways. This is the chore that will occupy us in the following section.

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The method of truth in metaphysics

Citations

The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory

The Philosophy of Philosophy

The Metaphysics of Properties

Go Figure: A Path through Fictionalism

Could man be an irrational animal

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