Please visit the conference Website for more information. We encourage you to register early. If you have any questions, please contact us at: sshap@mcmaster.ca

In this paper, I examine Quine’s views on the epistemology of logic. According to Quine’s influential holistic account, logic is central in the “web of belief” that comprises our overall theory of the world. Because of this, revisions to logic would have devastating systematic consequences, and this explains why we are loath to make such revisions. In section1, I clarify this idea and thereby show that Quine actually takes the web of belief to have asymmetrical internal structure. This raises two puzzles. First, as I show in section 2, Quine’s mature thoroughly naturalized view has it that logic is simply obvious, and this is explains why we do not typically consider revising it. While Quine presents this naturalized view as a way to make good on his earlier metaphor of centrality in a web of belief, I argue that the resources of Quine’s naturalized epistemology cannot adequately explain why we are reluctant to revise logic. And, Quine seems to recognize this point himself. In light of this, I explain in section 3 how Quine can allow that our overall scientific theory has systematic structure in a way that is consistent with his naturalistic strictures. Second, the asymmetrical internal structure of the web of belief seems to be inconsistent with its being a holistic web at all. I defuse this problem in section 4 by showing how Quine distinguishes between structural and confirmational considerations. I close by using this distinction to show how Quine’s view can evade Michael Friedman’s criticisms, and allow for important methodological distinctions between areas of the web of belief.

Discussions of the relation between pragmatism and logical empiricism tend to focus on the period when the logical empiricists found themselves in exile, mostly in the United States, and then attempt to gauge the actual extent of their convergence. My concern lies with the period before that and the question whether pragmatism had an earlier influence on the development of logical empiricism, especially on the thought of the former members of the “first” Vienna Circle. I argue for a substantially qualified affirmative answer.

Michael Beaney (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 1161 pp.

ISBN: 978–0–19–923884–2.

SSHAP is organizing a session at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA next week in Vancouver, in the group program on Thursday, April 2, 6-9 pm:

Other sessions of interest:

Wednesday, April 1, morning, 9-noon:

Thursday, April 2, morning, 9-noon:

Thursday, April 2, early evening, 4-6:

Friday, April 3, morning, 9-noon:

Friday, April 4, afternoon, 1-4:

Friday, April 3, early evening, 4-6

Volume 3, Number 2 is online now.

Dirk Greimann, Frege’s Performative Argument Against Truth Relativism,
Kevin C. Klement, Review of: Jolen Galaugher, Russell’s Philosophy of Logical Analysis: 1897–1905

We’re delighted to announce the publication of a new issue of JHAP.

After three years of operation, JHAP is also pleased to welcome five new associate editors and to feature a new Reviews section. Gary Ebbs, Kevin C Klement, Lydia Patton, Marcus Rossberg, and Audrey Yap are our new associate editors, in addition to Greg Frost-Arnold, Henry Jackman, Mark Textor, and Richard Zach. Sandra Lapointe remains editor in chief. The Reviews section is managed by Juliet Floyd, Chris Pincock, and Sean Morris.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 218 + xii $110 Hardcover. 

ISBN 978-1-137-30206-9. 

Reviewed by Kevin C. Klement 

There are two main interpretive positions on Davidson’s project in the theory of meaning. The Replacement Theory holds that Davidson aimed to replace the theory of meaning with the theory of truth on the grounds that meaning is too unclear a notion for systematic theorizing. The Traditional Pursuit Theory, in contrast, holds that Davidson aimed to pursue the traditional project with a clever bit of indirection, exploiting the recursive structure of a truth theory to reveal compositional semantic structure and placing constraints on it sufficient for its canonical assignments of truth conditions to be used for interpretation. This paper responds to a recent defense of a sophisticated version of the Replacement Theory by Gary Ebbs according to which Davidson was engaged in a Carnapian explication of meaning, intending to preserve only aspects of the usage of ‘means’ most important to us. I argue the Explication Interpretation cannot be sustained in the face of a detailed look at the passages that principally motivate it in “Truth and Meaning” when we take into account their local context, their context in the paper as a whole, and the context of that paper in Davidson’s contemporaneous work, and later work which tries to improve the formulations which he advanced in his early papers.

Discussions of the relation between pragmatism and logical empiricism tend to focus on the period when the logical empiricists found themselves in exile, mostly in the United States, and then attempt to gauge the actual extent of their convergence. My concern lies with the period before that and the question whether pragmatism had an earlier influence on the development of logical empiricism, especially on the thought of the former members of the “first” Vienna Circle. I argue for a substantially qualified affirmative answer.