Showing papers on "Ontology published in 1979"

Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding

Abstract: 1. The Model Muddle: Proposals for an Immodest Realism (1966).- 2. Reduction, Explanation and Ontology (1962).- 3. Models, Metaphysics and the Vagaries of Empiricism (1965).- 4. Metaphysics as Heuristic for Science (1965).- 5. Matter, Action and Interaction (1973).- 6. Towards a Critical Materialism (1971).- 7. The Relation Between Philosophy of Science and History of Science (1977).- 8. Telos and Technique: Models as Modes of Action (1968).- 9. From Praxis to Logos: Genetic Epistemology and Physics (1971).- 10. Pictures, Representation, and the Understanding (1972).- 11. Perception, Representation, and the Forms of Action: Towards an Historical Epistemology (1973).- 12. Rules and Representation: The Virtues of Constancy and Fidelity Put in Perspective (1978).- 13. Action and Passion: Spinoza's Construction of a Scientific Psychology (1973).- 14. Nature, Number and Individuals: Motive and Method in Spinoza's Philosophy (1978).- 15. Hume's Concept of Identity and the Principium Individuationis (1961).- 16. Diderot and the Development of Materialist Monism (1953).- 17. Art and Technology: Conflicting Models of Education? The Uses of a Cultural Myth (1973).- 18. Art as Humanizing Praxis (1976).- Name Index.

Causation and the flow of energy

Abstract: Causation has traditionally been analyzed either as a relation of nomic dependence or as a relation of counterfactual dependence. I argue for a third program, a physicalistic reduction of the causal relation to one of energy-momentum transference in the technical sense of physics. This physicalistic analysis is argued to have the virtues of easily handling the standard counterexamples to the nomic and counterfactual analyses, offering a plausible epistemology for our knowledge of causes, and elucidating the nature of the relation between causation and physical science.

A defense of physical becoming

Abstract: This paper defends physical becoming against Grunbaum's attack, by constructing three arguments in favor of physical becoming. Of the three, I rely primarily on an argument from the philosophy of language, and especially on the principle that tensed discourse involves presuppositions and commitments that Grunbaum's account of becoming cannot handle. I show that Grunbaum's analysis of becoming can provide only a very implausible reconstruction of the temporal coordination of speakers engaged in discourse.

The Reistic or Concretistic Approach

Abstract: The responsibilities of the secondary school teacher undoubtedly include the striving to make the pupils understand meanings of words as clearly and as distinctly as possible. This task acquires particular importance in the teaching of those disciplines which in library catalogues are called philosophical. This is so because the principal shortcomings of those disciplines, which also account for protracted controversies — for example, in epistemology, ontology, general theory of value, etc. — do not consist in defective observation or experimentation, or in using wrong forms of inference, but are mainly reducible to the habit of thinking, and correspondingly speaking, vaguely. Hence, whether he so desires or not, the teacher must build a system of verbal explanations and, as it were, compile a dictionary of those terms which sow confusion. And since every subject taught leads to some philosophical issues, every teacher must try to contribute to such a philosophical dictionary, and the professional teacher of philosophical subjects must help him in that, working out the dictionary not only for his own use, but also for use by teachers of other disciplines. For instance, the controversy is revived from time to time as to whether mathematics is an empirical or a purely deductive science. I have no intention of solving that problem here. My point is only that the controversy would not be chronic if the participants would distinctly realize the ambiguity of the term ‘empirical’. In the genetic sense, a statement can be understood as empirical only if the person concerned has ever previously observed something, or if he has observed at least one of the objects denoted by one of the terms involved in that statement. In the methodological sense, only such a statement which for its founding requires at least one observation statement as a premiss is empirical.

A Systemic World View

Abstract: In this, the last chapter, we shall generalize some of the results of the previous chapters. We shall thus come up with the core of a systemic world view. This Weltanschauung is a continuation of certain philosophical traditions and is also in tune with contemporary science. But it should not be mistaken for the popular “systems philosophy,” a new version of holism according to which everything is a system (false) and the patterns of being and becoming are basically the same at all levels (false). Our systemist philosophy is neither holistic nor atomistic: it acknowledges the variety of properties, kinds and patterns found in the world and, by using certain elementary formal tools, it avoids the obscurities of traditional philosophy. Ours is, in short, a kind of scientific ontology. (Cf. Vol. 3, Introduction.) Let us review some of its assumptions.

Matter, Action and Interaction

Abstract: In this paper, I will argue that a materialist ontology is an important heuristic for scientific theory, and that a classical problem in natural philosophy — whether matter is self-active or is inert — has its contemporary counterpart in modern physics, especially in microphysics From this, there follow epistemological and methodological consequences concerning scientific inquiry and practice In order to set the problem of my paper, I introduce as background the contemporary discussion of the relation of metaphysics to science The philosophical problem of the paper, however, does not concern the formal or methodological issues in this debate, but rather how these issues are resolved in a concrete case, concerning matter, action, and interaction

Logic as an Approach to Philosophy

Abstract: Ever since Aristotle’s Organon, logic has been recognized as an independent field of investigation It is not the widest domain even so, for that description belongs to the ontological domain Ontology has its own categories, one of which is possibility, and logic may be described as a subdomain of the domain of possibility, the one characterized (as we shall see) by the property of indissoluble asymmetric connectedness

Languages and Theories Adequate to the Ontology of the Language of Science

Abstract: Philosophers of science differ in their views concerning the subject matter of science, that is, what theorems are about and to what they refer. These problems are of an ontological nature. Some kind of ontology underlies every language of sciences. This discipline is concerned with “the general principles of being”, with what exists, the nature of what exists, types of entities, etc. The ontology of the language of science manifests itself in that language, if only in the syntax of that language, in the kinds of expressions used in that language and in the syntactic categories assigned to them. The idea that language determines an ontology has been emphasized in Poland by Roman Suszko.

Reduction, Explanation and Ontology

Abstract: In recent discussion of reduction in the sciences and its philosophical interpretation, the point has been made in different ways (by Carnap,1 Nagel,2 Quine,3 Oppenheim and Putnam,4 Bunge,5 Popper,6 and Hospers,7 among others) that reductive explanation does not necessarily entail ontological reduction, that what is reductively explained is not necessarily explained away, and that reduction is not simply a case of elimination of the reference of reduced terms or reduced theories.